MB BS courses have changed considerably in recent years. There has been a greater focus on professional development, cross-cutting skills beyond the traditional curriculum. It has yet to be established what is the best way of teaching the likes of communication skills.

That is the background to a recent paper by Katherine Joekes, Lorraine Noble and colleagues, now up at BMC Medical Education. The full team included researchers from UCL’s Division of Medical Education, St George’s Medical School and CHIME’s Dr Henry Potts.

We found that UCL medical students who had received new professional development teaching showed somewhat better performance in a test of communication skills, but the differences were modest, suggesting more needs to be done to help students acquire these essential skills.

Professor Sir John Tooke, talks about his vision for the UCL School of Life and Medical Sciences.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=si1_O6sL_N4]

Professor Sir John Tooke, Vice-Provost (Health), Head
of UCL School of Life & Medical Sciences and Head of UCL Medical School

I had two papers accepted at the end of last year. Williams & Potts, “Group membership and staff turnover affect outcomes in group CBT for persistent pain” has been accepted by Pain. This is a retrospective analysis of service data with the intriguing finding that higher rates of staff turnover were associated with poorer patient outcomes. The first author is Dr Amanda Williams in the Dept. of Clinical, Educational and Health Psychology at UCL.

Colligan, Anderson, Potts & Berman, “Does the process map influence the outcome of quality improvement work? A comparison of a sequential flow diagrams and a hierarchical task analysis diagram” has been accepted by BMC Health Services Research and is now available online in provisional form. This study found that the style of process map used to describe a clinical task had a significant effect on what risks in the task individuals identified. First author Dr Lacey Colligan is now at the University of Virginia, but previously did her MSc with us at CHIME.

Henry

It appears UCL’s trend in the last years has not changed. Guardian also wrote about the new Times Higher Education list, in which UCL has moved to 4th place, leaving Imperial College and Oxford behind.

Two of CHIME’s PhD students also have blogs. Şeref Arikan blogs here on health informatics and technology, as he has done for nearly two years now. Jeremy Dean, who CHIME shares with the Research Department of Clinical, Educational and Health Psychology, runs the popular PsyBlog on all things psychological.