Just-In-Time Learning in the Pediatric Emergency Department

TitleJust-In-Time Learning in the Pediatric Emergency Department
Faculty/College/UnitMedicine
StatusCompleted
Duration2 Year
Initiation04/01/2002
Completion03/31/2005
Funding Details
Year 1: Project YearYear 1
Year 1: Funding Year2002/2003
Year 1: Project TypeSmall TLEF
Year 1: Principal InvestigatorMartin V. Pusic
Year 1: Funded Amount48,242
Year 1: Team Members

Martin V. Pusic, Emergency Medicine, Pediatrics, Faculty of Medicine

Year 1: Summary

Medical students on rotation in the B.C. Children's Hospital Pediatric Emergency Department (PED) are expected to learn in a very daunting environment. Their teachers are under tremendous pressure to assess, treat, educate and arrange disposition of patients as quickly as possible. In-depth teaching of the medical student is too often sacrificed.

We propose to introduce a new method of teaching medical students while they are on-duty in the PED. We hope to take advantage of the teachable moment that occurs just after the medical student has, with the aid of their preceptor, completed the work-up and disposition of a patient. Instead of going immediately on to the next patient, the students would be asked to take ten minutes to complete an interactive computer tutorial. The tutorial would reinforce management principles for the clinical situation they had just encountered. The tutorials would be custom­ developed by the investigators so that the content reflected common emergency department clinical situations. Using both measures of knowledge gain and formative evaluation, we hope to demonstrate that this opportunity for reflection could be of significant educational benefit to the medical students while causing minimal disruption of the clinical flow within the PED. This technique could then be generalized to other outpatient settings.

A pilot study using six tutorials has been successfully implemented at McGill. We found that this number of tutorials is inadequate to deliver the tutorials in a Just-in-time fashion. We apply now to the TLEF to expand the breadth and depth of this project so that we can exploit it to the full potential of the technique.

Year 2: Project YearYear 2
Year 2: Funding Year2004/2005
Year 2: Project TypeSmall TLEF
Year 2: Principal InvestigatorMartin V. Pusic
Year 2: Funded Amount41,200
Year 2: Team Members

Martin V. Pusic, Pediatrics, College of Health Disciplines
J. Fraser, Pediatrics, College of Health Disciplines
N. Deghani, Pediatrics, College of Health Disciplines
S. Whitehouse, Pediatrics, College of Health Disciplines
D. Hewes, Pediatrics, College of Health Disciplines

Year 2: Summary

Medical and nursing students on rotation in the B.C. Children’s Pediatric Emergency Department (PED) are expected to learn in a very daunting environment. Their teachers are under tremendous pressure to manage patients quickly. In-depth teaching of the student is too often sacrificed. We propose to introduce a new method of teaching students while they are on-duty in the PED. We hope to take advantage of the teachable moment that occurs just after the student has, with the aid of their preceptor, completed the work-up and disposition of a patient. Instead of going immediately on to the next patient, the students would be asked to take 10 min to complete an interactive computer tutorial. With TLEF funding we have successfully developed a suite of 16 tutorials and installed them in the PED. We now re-apply to the TLEF to develop a mechanism that would allow full integration into the PED curriculum for both medical and nursing students. This project has important implications for delivering a standardized curriculum across the new distributed medical school.