Assessment in health sciences education has become an extremely critical issue in recent years, given the rapidly changing disease patterns and behavioral changes in communities among diverse cultural and economic contexts of patients. Globally, there is increasing demand for highly qualified contemporary healthcare professionals. Subsequently,…

A survey of the design, emphases, and content of predoctoral curriculum in orthodontics shows wide variation in the amount and timing of didactic and clinical instruction. (MSE)

A masters-level social work curriculum integrating gerontological knowledge, clinical knowledge, clinical experience, and aimed at developing a task-centered model for work with the elderly is described and discussed. Questions remain about which adaptations to the model are most effective, but student preparation for this work has improved. (MSE)

A clinical program developed for Veterans Administration optometry residents and rotating Southern California College of Optometry interns consisted of clinical patient examination followed by case discussion, a formal lecture corresponding to the ocular and systemic diseases presented in the examination, and student testing. (MSE)

A prototype program leading to a clinically-oriented Master of Science degree in pharmacology is described. It differs from a clinical residency program, does not give a wide clinical medicine exposure, and is heavily oriented towards pharmacology and research, thereby developing students with scientific perspectives who can work as consultants.…

Considerations to be made in designing an optometry curriculum for treating patients with eye diseases are reviewed, including the scope of practice and specific areas of instruction in the biomedical, basic vision, and clinical vision sciences. (MSE)

A medical humanities program emphasizing clinically oriented training is described. The four-year required curriculum, in which students accompany attending physicians on rounds, is taught by faculty representing a wide range of medical and non-medical disciplines. The approach is seen to challenge good teachers and evoke humanities themes from…

Development of master's level clinical concentration is described with focus on: theory with method skills; method learning in the modalities of individuals, families, and groups; clinical learning with other areas of social work methodology; and field experience with classroom learning. (Author/LBH)

Forty hospital pharmacists participated in a 2 week pilot of a postgraduate clinical pharmacy clerkship, using different hospital services as teaching sites at the University of Illinois and Cook County hospitals in Chicago. The clerkship experience broadened participants' conceptions of the depth and scope of the clinical pharmacist's role.…

A modified systems program has been developed at the University of Ottowa that incorporates advantages of the systems approach into whole-class teaching without increasing demands on staff. A total of 387 lecture and laboratory hours previously assigned to organ pathology and clinical departments are allocated to committees representing 12…

Residency programs for primary practice are described with focus on: model practice goals, the setting, and scheduling; faculty, including some approaches for resolving the new "town-gown" dichotomy; and the two basic types of curricula (family medicine model and the more traditional internship experience). (JT)

English legal history should continue to be taught in our law schools because it does provide context for the study of American law, but it has long been a question how much of that context has value in training for actual practice. (Author/KE)

Some of the concepts and procedures of curricular design and student evaluation utilized by the clinical faculty within the PharmD program at the University of Missouri-Kansas City are described. Specific competencies, curriculum objectives, clinical review conferences, and verbal challenge examinations are appended. (LBH)

Computer-based clinical simulations used in medical education are designed according to decisions about which elements of reality to explicitly include, which to leave to imagination, and when to intervene for educational purposes. Programs offer many options for structuring the simulations, such as varying levels of volunteered information about…

A study compared the performance of dental students following the traditional clinical curriculum that requires exposure to a specific range of discipline-oriented procedures with that of eight similar students in a curriculum focused on meeting patient needs but not traditional curriculum-based requirements. The nonrequirement group had higher…