I was talking with my brother during a road trip this weekend and it always amazes me what incredible learners medical students tend to be. But this conversation didn’t have as much to do with learning as it had to do with how things have changed in the teaching of med students and the practice of medicine while in the field and what kind of sims would really make things better for med students.
Mirroring an episode of Scrubs where the Chief of Medicine “Bob” tries his hand at bedside practice again after being behind a desk for many years and found that his patient was far more informed on her condition than he was, even more informed about his own history because she had googled him and her own condition on her Blackberry. Bob didn’t take very well to this and in the end even though the patient knew the facts, she didn’t have any means to apply them.
My brother and I were talking about this happening in the real world as well as patients are coming into hospitals knowing (sometimes) more about their condition than the doctor does. His comment to this was that this is fine, but knowing and applying are two completely different things and that any good doctor worth their salt, should be using the host of internet connected computers to look up facts, figures, drug interactions and the sort when they can rather than trying to be an old school encyclopedia with legs.
The key to dealing with all this knowledge is the ability to apply it and combine it with everything else that one already knows.
This synthesis is something that is not what many of the sims that exist out there already allow for. The sims out there right now seem to be focused on just knowing the facts, but what we both said was that it would be far more useful if the sim didn’t focus so much on the facts as it did the procedure and the reasoning behind the steps. Learning the basics allows for something to hang all the other facts that one picks up along the way.
To make things even better, these sims that provide the basics of a procedure should be available everywhere – on mobile devices so that a professional that needs to fill in some knowledge gap can, and do so anywhere there is network coverage.
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