Hot off the press: CDEM meeting agenda at ACEP

The agenda for the Clerkship Directors in Emergency Medicine (CDEM) meeting at the American College of Emergency Physicians (ACEP) annual meeting is set! This was just sent out by the CDEM Chair, Dr. Dave Wald (Temple). If you are going to be in Boston, MA on October 6, come join us! Some exciting and practical topics will be discussed.

Tuesday, October 6, 2009
1:00pm – 4:00pm
Room TBA
Boston, MA

1:00pm – 1:15pm
CDEM Update

1:15pm – 2:30pm
Best practices for EM Undergraduate Medical Education

2:30pm – 2:45pm
Break

2:45pm – 3:45pm
Best practices for EM Undergraduate Medical Education (Continued)

3:45pm – 4pm
Wrap up

The goal of the "Best Practices" sessions is to be interactive. Based on the size of the audience, we may break everyone up into small groups and have a team based approach. Below is a preliminary list of topics. Additional topics may be presented depending on time. It would be best to spend an hour or two thinking about some of the below topics questions and prepare some ideas coming into the sessions.



1. Educational guidelines ED–2 and ED–8 from the Liaison Committee in Medical Education (LCME) regarding standardizing the medical student experience in terms of what patient conditions (s)he must encounter before graduation.

• What types of patients, clinical conditions, procedures, tasks must students encounter during your rotation?
• How did you develop your list?
• How do you keep track of this and how to you remediate?
  

2. Educational guidelines ED–26 from the LCME, regarding the assessment of competency and evaluation of clinical skills

• What type of shift evaluation cards or other methods of student evaluation do you use?
• Do you employ any type of procedural competency checklist?
• What are your clerkship competencies?
• How do you evaluate your clerkship competencies, RIME, etc.?
• Do you employ any direct observation of clinical skills?

3. Standardized Letter of Recommendations (SLOR)

• Who writes them at your institution?
• Are the letters mandatory or voluntary?
• Bring examples of challenging letters for discussion
• Ways to improve the letter?
• How many should a student get?

4. Mentoring students with academic or other challenges, etc.

• Student’s with poor USMLE Step I scores
• When should they take USMLE step II
• How many programs should students with fair-average grades apply to?
• Couples match advice?

This agenda is to give you an idea of what we, as medical student educators, talk about on the national level. I'll be at the second half of this CDEM meeting, because I'm lecturing on "Acute Limb Ischemia" at the same time during 1:30-2:30 pm. I plan to hurry over after my talk, because I always learn lots from our discussions. Come join!