News Archives |

January 8, 2021January 15, 2021

Ocean waves, footprints and dashboards: the selection of DID-ACT evaluation and learning analytics tools

by Andrzej Kononowicz

Every project needs evaluation. Even though it might sometimes be considered as cumbersome or stressful for those whose work is evaluated, it is important that the merits and limitations of any given project are clearly laid out. A well-conducted evaluation ideally goes beyond highlighting the particular achievements of a program by delivering ideas for improvement. Furthermore it justifies the need to continue the efforts surrounding the project and its aims. It is commonplace that evaluation and feedback are employed during the last stage of the curriculum development cycle. However, it is well-founded that initiating evaluations in program development should be started as early as possible. The benefits are many with the central reasoning being that evaluating early on maintains and ensures that the chosen tools align with the planned outcome(s).

December 14, 2020January 15, 2021

No Clinical Reasoning Without Me – It’s Time to Put the Client’s Perspective in the Forefront

by Maria Elvén

Generally, clinical reasoning refers to a health professional’s thinking and decision-making process. It guides practical actions, implying a process limited to the cognitive activities of health professionals. In more elaborated definitions of clinical reasoning, we may also find concepts such as collaboration and context. These imply a broader view of the reasoning process where the client and situational factors also come into play. The number of definitions of clinical reasoning are innumerable. Variations within and between different professional disciplines are equally as many. There is no established singular definition of the nature, relevant components or boundaries of a health professional’s clinical reasoning. The co-existence of multiple definitions leads to a plethora of variation in clinicians’ view(s) of clinical reasoning. These variations in turn influence their consistent and uniform application of reasoning in practice.

December 4, 2020January 15, 2021

Curricular Framework for DID-ACT

By Jennifer Vrouvides

We published our most recent deliverable this week: Developing, implementing, and disseminating an adaptive clinical reasoning curriculum for healthcare students and educators.

November 9, 2020January 15, 2021

Teaching Clinical Reasoning – A student’s perspective

by Ada Frankowska

Hello! I’m Ada, a junior doctor from Cracow, Poland. I would like to describe how teaching clinical reasoning looks like from a student’s perspective – I just graduated university in June, so my memories are still fresh. Let’s get on with it!

September 20, 2020January 15, 2021

DID-ACT at AMEE 2020

by Andrzej Kononowicz

The Association for Medical Education in Europe (AMEE) is one of the biggest organisations focused on excellence and research in health professions education. It has been organising annual conferences for scholars engaged in this topic for close to 50 years. The interest in these meetings is rising and has reached the level of around 4000 participants last year. The DID-ACT consortium decided to disseminate its outcomes at AMEE by submitting an abstract informing about the results of the project’s needs analysis.

August 5, 2020January 15, 2021

Covid-19 Summer Term 2020

by Martin Adler

Summer term 2020 was special. Most universities start their summer term in April and thus, with the onset of the Corona outbreak in March, their preparation time given the circumstances was reduced drastically. One of the major challenges was that face-to-face lectures had to be planned online. In a very short amount of time, new online conference systems were established, and the necessary technical support was partially organized with the help of student tutors. Even though people who work on international projects are already used to video conferencing solutions, the amount of potential technical difficulties is still high and bandwidth issues can destroy all previous efforts.

June 30, 2020January 15, 2021

A look back on an eventful first half year

by Felicitas Wagner & Sören Huwendiek, Universität Bern

The first phase of the DID-ACT project (January – June 2020) was a very intense and insightful time. The main goal of the first project phase was to conduct a needs assessment among different stakeholder groups regarding a longitudinal clinical reasoning curriculum for students and a train-the-trainer course for teachers. Also, barriers for the implementation for such a curriculum and course as well as potential solutions were investigated.

June 3, 2020June 3, 2020

Barriers for a clinical reasoning curriculum

As part of the DID-ACT project we conducted over 40 interviews with educators, students and clinical reasoning experts asking them among other questions, what barriers they see for developing a clinical reasoning curriculum for students and a train-the-trainer course for teachers. Interestingly, one of the most important barriers mentioned by the interviewees were cultural barriers. This includes aspects such as a lack of collaboration among educators, no culture of reflection, no culture of dealing with errors, and a resistance to change. A second category of barriers was related to the teaching process. Interviewees identified obstacles such as a lack of awareness that clinical reasoning can be taught, a lack of qualified educators to teach students, and also a lack of guidance and standards on how to teach clinical reasoning.

The results of the interviews can be found in the D1.1b report.

As already started in our ideation workshop we are now discussing solutions to overcoming these barriers – the results will be published by the end of June!

May 8, 2020January 15, 2021

Online ideation workshop

In our specific needs analysis we have identified a wide range of barriers and needs for the implementation of a clinical reasoning curriculum in a survey and semi-structured interviews. As a next step we had planned a face-to-face design thinking workshop on May 5th in Krakow, Poland, to develop solutions to overcoming these barriers and addressing the needs. Due to the travel restrictions we decided to try something new and do the workshop in a synchronous online meeting after an asynchronous individual preparation phase.