Do, don’t and don’t know: guidelines for medical education with a difference
Perspect Med Educ (2015) 4:275–276
DOI 10.1007/s40037-015-0230-8
E d i to r i a l
Do, don’t and don’t know: guidelines for medical education
with a difference
Robert K. McKinley · Fedde Scheele
Published online: 29 October 2015
© The Author(s) 2015. This article is published with open access at Springerlink.com
As clinician educators, we are busy people. We balance the
demands of clinical service, administration, management,
education and training. We aim to both meet the expectations of and to achieve the best possible outcomes for our
patients, service and learners. Unfortunately, we suspect
that many of us find that our educational practice comes last.
We have to fit teaching and training around our clinical and
administration and management responsibilities. And when
it comes to our continuing professional development our
learning needs as clinicians must come first.
But we are clinical educators not because we have to be,
it is because we want to be. We read the abstracts of papers
which offer tantalizing insights into ways in which we could
improve our teaching and training. But can we trust the
abstract? We set the paper aside on the ever growing pile of
papers we must get round to reading one day. And never do.
Of course we have guidelines and systematic reviews to
which we could turn. But they are long, heavy in academic
detail and unfortunately often heavy to read. And they too
get set aside on the pile of papers we must get round to reading one day. And never do.
In this issue we publish the first of a series of ‘Guidelines
for medical education’, which we hope will be different. Our
aim is that they will succinctly summarize what you should
do because there is evidence it works, what you should not
R.K. McKinley ()
Keele University School of Medicine,
ST5 5BG,
Keele, Staffordshire UK
e-mail:
F. Scheele
VU University,
Amsterdam, The Netherlands
do because there is evidence that it does not work or indeed
is likely to cause ‘educational harm’ and things which,
although they offer potential, we do not know whether they
work or not: the ‘Do’s, Don’ts and Don't Knows’ (or ‘D3) of
medical education. Initially, we will focus on topics of interest to clinician educators. Each will be written by a small
group of authors, authorities in the subject, most of whom
are also clinicians. Each D3 will have a short tabulated summary of the Do’s, Don’ts and Don’t Knows’, an indication
of the strength of evidence which underpins them and be
backed up by an authoritative summary of the underpinning
evidence. Our aim is that they will be both accessible to
busy clinicians and make a contribution to scholarship: by
identifying important ‘Don't Knows’, we hope to stimulate
research.
This is an experimental format which is not yet cast in
stone—and may never be. Some guidelines may be underpinned by new systematic reviews while some, because of
the wealth of existing reviews, will not be. Our methods
of indicating the strength of evidence may evolve. As editors we will learn how to support our authors in producing
them. The first D3 addresses giving feedback to learners on
their performance [1]. We would like to thank Janet Lefroy,
Chris Watling, Pim Teunissen and Paul Brand for authoring it and for their patience in working with us to address
a target which was probably inadequately drawn initially,
and expectations which evolved as we reviewed successive
versions. We would also like to thank the authors for developing our ideas, in particular their method of describing
the strength of evidence, which is better than what we suggested. We have co-written the instructions for authors with
Janet Lefroy to combine her experience as the lead author of
the prototype D3 with our expectations as editors.
We aim to publish two each year and we hope you find
each D3 accessible, useful and a stimulus for both your edu-
276
cational practice and research. We would value your feedback on the format and the content as we work to make them
as useful as possible to you, our readers and colleagues.
Open Access This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative
Commons Attribution License which permits any use, distribution, and
reproduction in any medium, provided the original author(s) and the
source are credited.
Reference
1. Lefroy J, Watling C, Teunissen PW, Brand P. Guidelines on feedback for clinical education, The Do’s, Don’ts and Don’t Knows of
feedback for clinical education. Perspect Med Educ. 2015. DOI:
10.1007/s40037-015-0231-7.
R.K. McKinley, F. Scheele
Robert K. McKinley is a professor of Education in General Practice
and general practitioner.
Fedde Scheele gynaecologist and professor in Health Systems Innovation and Education.
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