Evaluation Of Procedural Skills: Fill & Download for Free

I found surgery having a unique charm to it which I couldn't come across in other departments.Disclaimer : These are personal opinions alone and I’m not trying to belittle any medical branches. I totally understand that each branch is unique and so is each doctor’s interest in a specialty.I tried to think myself in roles other than being a surgeon and no specialty could fit all the criteria which I thought was essential.So, what’s that special ??Practicality takes precedence over fantasy for you cannot fool yourself or others for long!!Surgeons, I felt were more practical. If in doubt even if the scans suggest otherwise, the patient is considered for surgery as time cannot be lost with an ambiguous imaging and ending up losing the patient.A sense of calmness does exist even when the surroundings appear to be chaotic, both while in emergency or during a surgical procedure, probably from seeing all the blood routinely and confidence of controlling any situation.Patients actually felt better after a procedure in most cases if not all properly planned / evaluated cases compared to medical specialities where satisfaction I found was not that great.Surgery / being a surgeon requires a sense of leadership as it needs coordination from different areas of healthcare, so at times surgeons may be intimidating.I always felt that a good surgeon is a good physician first as the job requires you to rule out all other causes for the similar condition, which is not very easy, trust me!!You need to have a good pair of hands for procedural skills, which may not be the case with most specialities. No wonder surgery is considered an art based on science.Image source : Google

The number one way to cope with this is with the consolation that you have the best training and you did all you could. You come to terms rather quickly that patients will die. Literally, in your first semester of medical school you will take Human Anatomy where your lab will involve standing in a room crowded with dead bodies. Death is all around you and you all become aware that doctors couldn’t stop all these people who donated their bodies from dying. You won’t be able to either.The much tougher thing to come to terms with is dealing with the inevitable reality that you made a mistake that harmed a patient. This can manifest itself in a lot of ways. You might allow bias to creep into your evaluation and anchor on the wrong diagnosis, minimizing new data that doesn’t support your pet diagnosis until too late. You may fail to recall important diagnostic criteria needed to make that diagnosis. You could make an error of omission which are fairly common. The worst case scenario though is errors of commission. These are the creation of inadvertent harm through some therapy you are employing to try to help the patient. Think procedural complications. These will happen.Imagine lying in bed after your work day knowing that you hurt someone accidentally. You were supposed to protect them from harm and make them better but you hurt or even killed them because your procedural skill was lacking. There is no consolation that “you did your best”. You can’t kid your self and say “I did all I could”. You missed the diagnosis which is now just so obvious in retrospect. You hurt someone you were supposed to help and now self doubt is your new companion. Some physicians never get over this. They become over utilizers of diagnostic studies. They are slow to make decisions and can become paralyzed with doubt. It can become professionally incapacitating.There is no easy path through or over this. Sadly, it’s not even talked about openly in most medical training programs. It absolutely should be because all physicians (for now) are human. And, all humans are fallible.

I have served as an examiner at the Open University and several other universities in the UK and overseas. The examinations at the Open University are at least as rigorous as those at any other university. Because the Open University deals with larger student cohorts than those of many other universities, procedures are in place to ensure the reliability of marking systems. The student numbers allow the statistical evaluation of the mark distributions and other comparisons in ways not feasible in smaller cohorts.The student experience is very different to that of conventional universities. The closest comparison is with the University of London External Programme but there are important differences that enable the External Programme make courses available more widely internationally.Many of the texts written for the Open University are used by other colleges. Most notably the texts advising students on study skills.