Journal of Medical Education
Volume:14 Issue: 4, Nov 2015

Background and Nutrition plays a key role in maintaining and promoting health and preventing diseases. In most medical schools, Nutrition education is not sufficient and only 26% of college students have proper nutritional education programs. Physicians should use their knowledge through education and counseling with patients and healthy people to increase people’s level of health. Poor eating habits are considered as a factor of chronic disease. Therefore, the aim of this study was to determine medical interns and clerkship students’ viewpoint about nutrition course at a specific medical school. This study was descriptive and 87 interns and clerkship students of Birjand University of Medical Sciences participated. The data were collected using a valid and reliable questionnaire based on the existing topics in nutrition, the time allocated, their educational needs as well as the issues that physicians have the greatest exposure to. After completing the questionnaire, all of the data were collected, coded, and analyzed using SPSS software, version 15. The chi-square test was used to compare the views of interns and medical students. Of the participants, 72.4% were female, 27.6% were male, 57.5% were medical students, and 42.5% were interns. According to these students, 51.7% considered one nutrition course in the second semester to be appropriate, and that the topic of improved nutrition in vulnerable groups was more effective during the clinical stage (63.2%). In addition, the need to learn about nutrition in vulnerable groups, foods and nutritious, diseases caused by malnutrition, and food health (66.7%, 57.5%, 54%, and 52.9%, respectively) was considered to be more important. Moreover, 55.2% of the participants considered nutrition in vulnerable groups to be highly relevant, while 51.7% believed that malnutrition-related diseases was more relevant. Most of the students considered the topics of foods and nutrients, food health, nutrition of vulnerable groups, and malnutrition-related diseases with high professional applicability to be highly functional (64.4%, 56.3%, 51.7%, and 50.6%, respectively); and most participants (89.7%) believed that learning about hospital diets was essential. There was a significant difference between men and women in terms of their views on the appropriateness of the topics of the nutrition course with regard to current social problems so that 70.8% of the men believed they fit the current social problems, while 55.5% of the women thought they were inappropriate. Considering the importance of a nutrition course, it is better to provide topics related to the clerkship period, with the applicability of the clinical setting being taught at the same time.

Background and Medical education program's success depends on the efficiency and adequacy of clinical experiences, one of the most important factors recognized in this field is learning atmosphere and environment. Professor’s features, student's learning experiences and characteristics of the program implementation environment are of those cases that vary in different universities. One of the most important resources for the evaluation of universities’ educational atmosphere is students who interact directly with the process. The aim of this study was to investigating the viewpoint of residents of Babol University of Medical Sciences to educational atmosphere of education environment. This was a cross-sectional study that was conducted on 100 residents studying in hospitals affiliated to Babol University of Medical Sciences. The tools used included 8 demographic questions and 30 questions related to the areas of a student perception of social conditions, clinical teachers and learning by DREEM standard questionnaire. Totally, residents have had desirable views toward perception of learning and clinical teachers (73%) and social conditions (63%). There was a significant relationship between all three areas (P=0.001). There was a significant relationship between clinical departments and resident's viewpoint of their learning (P=0.001). Pediatrics and internal medicine residents feel more positive towards their own learning environment. Residents with executive experience have had a more negative feeling to the university education status (P=0.05). Among all residents, those in the second year have had a more positive viewpoint towards the three areas in question (P=0.002). According to the findings, residents have had a desirable viewpoint towards the university education environment. However, regarding problems in the clinical learning environments there is a need to adopt more comprehensive strategies.

Medical professional behavior includes the characteristics of devotion, integrity, compassion, good communication skills, respect, responsibility, excellence and leadership. Evaluation plays an important role in identifying the professionalism of both people and training. Thus, this study was conducted to evaluate the professional behavior of clinical residents. In this descriptive study, 50 clinical attending physicians were randomly selected as the population of the study. Each attending physician completed assessment forms for two residents with whom they had rounds for more than one month. P-MEX was used for data collection and data analysis was done through descriptive method using one-sample t-test. Based on the results, the professional behavior of residents were as follows: 8.9% under the expected level, 57.4% at the expected level, 32.7% over the expected level and no residents were at an unacceptable level. Discussion and The present study was conducted for the first time considering the fact that no professionalism assessment tool was provided for clinical departments. The study had useful results and some important steps can be taken in the future by localization of the P-MEX tool, adding items accepted by professionals and doing a 360-degree assessment.

Background and The objective of medical education is to train competent and qualified workforce in order to provide services in various health environments. One of the important objectives of Operating Room students is to train workforce who can involve in patient’s health and recovery. Training these students should cause clinical ability and independent decision making during surgery. Since students during internship face with many problems, this study has been conducted to explore and describe the challenges and experiences. This qualitative study is a phenomenology that was conducted based on 20 students in the last semester of Operating Room associate’s degree with purposive sampling. Deep and semi-structured interviews were used to collect data and data were analyzed by content analysis method. The findings in 5 main themes: (1) Physical space and equipment in the operating room, (2) The student’s position in operating room, (3) Integrating knowledge and action, (4) Managing education environment and 5- Student’s viewpoint about operating room and working in it. Interviews with students revealed the educational environment challenges with which they are faced during their study. Teachers can provide solutions to overcome the challenges and create a positive atmosphere for student's learning using results of this study and students may continue their interest in education and improve the quality of their education.

Background and Using valid and reliable instruments is an important way for collecting data in qualitative researches. This paper is a report of a study conducted to examine the extent of psychometric properties of the scales in research papers published in Journal of Advanced Nursing. In this study, the Journal of Advanced Nursing was chosen for systematic review. All articles which were published during 2007-2009 in this journal were collected and articles related to instrument development were selected. Each article was completely reviewed to identify the methods of instrument validation and reliability. From 980 articles published in Journal of Advanced Nursing during 2007-2009, 41 (4.18%) articles were about research methodology. In these, 12 articles (29.27%) were related to developing an instrument. In this study, review of 12 articles that published in Journal of Advanced Nursing, 2007-2009, showed that some of the articles did not measure psychometric properties properly, thus some of the developed scales need to measure other types of necessary validity. In addition, reliability testing needs to be performed on each instrument used in a study before other statistical analysis are performed. From 12 articles, all of the articles measured and reported Cronbach’s alpha, but four of them did not measure test-retest. Although researchers put a great emphasis on methodology and statistical analysis, they pay less attention to the psychometric properties of their new instruments. The authors of this article hope to draw the attention of researcher to the importance of measuring psychometric properties of new instruments.

Background and "Morning Report" is a traditional ritual in medical education programs; it includes a diverse group of teachers and learners with heterogeneous learning goals. We performed a cross-sectional survey of residents, medical students and staffs using a convenience sample. A 33-item survey was developed with the assistance of a pilot study and two focus groups. Our participants were from four different educational wards including Surgery, Internal Medicine, Pediatrics and Obstetrics & Gynecology. 78% of the respondents stated that morning report sessions motivated them for self-directed learning and 70.3% of respondents stated that the format of morning report is good. 57.6% of respondents stated that discussed cases in the morning report are varied, 80% of the respondents experienced lack of appropriate feedback. 56.8% of the respondents stated discussion about the case results in better management of the patient, 39% stated that morning report results in resolving diagnosis problems. 50% of the respondents stated that there are enough communions between attending physician and student. There was not any significant difference between answers of residents, medical students and faculty members. We found considerable non-performance in attends (?) performance in running morning report sessions. Defining the roles of attends in optimizing learning, such as more attention towards developing problem solving and critical thinking skills and convergence between the attitudes and motivations of the learners and the teachers is strongly recommended.