(This competency is weighted ~15% of your overall clerkship evaluation.)
This competency is all about developing self-directed, life-long learning habits. It is also the area where experience using a portfolio can be of the most benefit. In order to analyze your own practice and identify areas for improvement, you need to have some documentation of your current practice. Physicians often do this by auditing their charts and looking at patient outcomes (like HgbA1c in their diabetic patients). That isn’t feasible for medical students and your developmental needs are somewhat different from practicing physicians. (In the UK, physicians now have the option of using portfolios for CME rather than attending the ubiquitous short courses.)
The key to allowing the portfolio to help you (rather than being a documentation burden) is look at what you are doing, reflect on it, and allow that to drive your future learning goals and plans. Waiting to put everything in your portfolio at the last minute and noticing the night before the exam that you’ve had very little exposure to cardiac problems is clearly undesirable for everyone.
This competency also includes staying up to date with information technology and the medical literature, including the ability to critically appraise the literature and apply it to practice. The following are some suggestions of how you can demonstrate competence in this area:
- Goals (Required)
- Evidence-Based Medicine Project
(Required)
- EBM Report
- Journal Club
- EBM talk to team
- Lead Evidence-Based physical finding rounds
- EBM discussion in a write-up
- Use of interactive web
sites for Interpretation of
Common Clinical Tests (for example ECG and CXR interpretation) - some documentation is Required
- Patient Log (Clerkship
requirement)
- Reading log/study guide
- Prepare teaching materials and/or give educational talks to
your team or classmates
- Learn how to use a new technological resource that can help with
patient care
