Objective: The authors demonstrate that the teaching of professional boundaries in psychiatry is an essential component of training to prevent harm to patients and to the profession. Methods: The authors illustrate overarching principles that apply to didactic teaching in seminars and to psychotherapy supervision. Results: The teaching of…

Effective communication skills are considered essential to a physician's professional competence. Thus, Finnish medical schools include communication skills training in their curricula. Today it is essential to ensure that students graduate with the interpersonal communication competence (ICC) necessary to succeed in their profession. Experiential…

Teachers try to help their students learn. But why do they make the particular teaching choices they do? What resources do they draw upon? What accounts for the success or failure of their efforts? In "How We Think", esteemed scholar and mathematician, Alan H. Schoenfeld, proposes a groundbreaking theory and model for how we think and act in the…

The objective of this paper is to draw attention to four features that distinguish the pedagogy of patient interviewing from the teaching of other clinical skills: (a) students are not naive to the skill to be learned, (b) they encounter role models with a wide variability in interviewing styles, (c) clinical teachers are not usually specialists…

In a medical sociology course composed of health care students with little sociology background and sociology students with no health care background, a paired observation exercise was given. Health care and sociology students were paired, and each pair observed the same medical encounter and reviewed each other's papers. (Author/RM)

A triple-contract model of the relationship between a profession and a society includes a hypothetical contract articulating the profession's basic principles, a second contract suggesting the model for real-life face-to-face meetings creating moral terms limiting the relationship between professionals and society, and a third contract containing…

"Communication: The Social Matrix of Psychiatry" (J. Ruesch and G. Bateson) is a work that outlines in a more conversational than pedantic way a theory of human communication. The main thrust is to unite two types of organized information: (1) an understanding of the cultural matrix within which the psychiatrist operates; and (2) the nature of…

This document is one of seven publications contained in a series of materials for physicians on recognizing, intervening with, and treating adolescent alcoholism. It contains the faculty guide which accompanies the six units of study in the series, and is meant to facilitate the use of the six units of study in a variety of settings and with a…

Two models of moral responsibility in dentistry--the beneficence model (to know what is in the best interest of those served) and the autonomy model (the patient has values and beliefs underlying his/her perspective on his/her own best interests)--are outlined, and a framework for resolving conflict between the two is presented. (MSE)

A discussion of pharmaceutical curriculum design to meet the competency needs of professional pharmacists looks at the nature of competency, anticipates some of the demands of such a curriculum, describes some methods of organizing curriculum elements, and provides a brief bibliography. (MSE)

A comparison of patient (n=181) and tutor (n=31) evaluations of medical student (n=41) behavior in an internal medicine clerkship revealed difficulties with patient evaluation of students. The process is time consuming and introduces tension between students and patients, and patients are poor discriminators. (Author/MSE)

This teaching guide for a dental health curriculum for children in the Head Start Program contains lesson plans for the following areas: (1) introduction to the dental health program; (2) visiting the dentist; (3) awareness of the mouth; (4) the important functions of the mouth; (5) the importance of keeping teeth and gums clean; (6)…

Surveys of first- and fourth-year Johns Hopkins University (Maryland) medical students found little change in attitudes about abortion over four years. Attitudes correlated most strongly with personal beliefs about when a fetus is considered human life and somewhat with student gender. Results are used in a medical ethics course to illuminate…

The curriculum design, philosophy, and innovation of four programs in geriatric optometry are described: the Pennsylvania College of Optometry and the colleges of Optometry at the State University of New York, University of Alabama at Birmingham, and University of Houston. (MSE)

Medical faculty who choose and tell stories appropriately, especially if they are of their own clinical experiences, can stimulate students to examine their own values and attitudes. A sample story illustrates how the technique can help students address crises in professionalization and aspects of the doctor-patient relationship. (Author/MSE)