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Medical schools, programs and educators are increasingly expected to address medical student stress and wellbeing, yet also ensure student competence and fitness to practice. Educators play a central role in supporting students when evaluating a student's concerns and in deciding whether support and/or sanction should be offered. It is not known how educators approach or resolve such potentially contradictory responses. We conducted an interview study of 21 medical educators from a range of professional backgrounds across 11 on-campus and clinical teaching sites. Using Positioning Theory to inform our thematic analysis, we found that participants adopted an overarching position of Diagnostician, and at times, two alternative positions, the Judge and the Confidant when supporting students. In their narratives of support encounters, individual students were positioned as Good Students or Troubling Students. For most, educator positions were fluid and responsive to the storylines enacted in encounters. Rigidly adopting Judge or Confidant positions could lead to "failure to fail" and violations of professional boundaries. Positioning Theory locates student support in a moral space and helps explain the consternation experienced by educators when support is not effective. Positioning analysis offers a language, and metaphors which are meaningful to educators, for framing discussion and reviews of support practices and progression decisions. Such insights could encourage reflective practice and guide further research to inform practice when students with troubling concerns and persistently borderline performances require support.

SUMMARY: Background: Adapting existing training resources for clinical teachers is more efficient than creating resources de novo. There is limited evidence on how to effectively use and ensure the relevance of training materials originally developed for different contexts and audiences. We tested in Sri Lanka and Malaysia the transferability of scenario‐based training videos and session plans developed for Australian medical schools, to identify those aspects which need adaptation, and make recommendations to enhance transferability. Methods: Staff involved in student support from three medical schools were invited to participate in five workshops facilitated by an Australian educator. Video discussion triggers of students presenting with concerns were used in workshop activities, including written exercises, group discussions and reflection. The quantitative and qualitative data collected included categorical and free‐text participant responses to questionnaires and structured field notes from local faculty developers using peer observation. Findings: Academic and clinician‐teacher participants predominated in the workshops. Of 66 participant questionnaires (92% response rate), over 90% agreed that the workshop was relevant, and over 95% agreed that the videos facilitated discussion and the sharing of experiences. Field notes confirmed that participants were engaged by the videos, but identified that one student scenario and the approaches for seeking support in others were not immediately transferable to local contexts. The adaptation of facilitation techniques used in Australian workshops was needed to address audience responses. Discussion: Our findings confirm faculty development principles of content relevancy and incorporation of reflection. To enhance transferability, we recommend co‐facilitation with local faculty members, the explicit signposting of topics and re‐contextualising key concepts through reflective discussion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Introduction:There has been little qualitative research examining how physical examination skills are learned, particularly the sensory and subjective aspects of learning. The authors set out to study how medical students are taught and learn the skills of listening to sound. Methods:As part of an ethnographic study in Melbourne, 15 semi-structured in-depth interviews were conducted with students and teachers as a way to reflect explicitly on their learning and teaching. Results:From these interviews, we found that learning the skills of listening to lung sounds was frequently difficult for students, with many experiencing awkwardness, uncertainty, pressure, and intimidation. However not everyone found this process difficult. Often those who had studied music reported finding it easier to be attentive to the frequency and rhythm of body sounds and find ways to describe them. Conclusions:By incorporating, distinctively in medical education, theoretical insights into “attentiveness” from anthropology and science and technology studies, the article suggests that musical education provides medical students with skills in sensory awareness. Training the senses is a critical aspect of diagnosis that needs to be better addressed in medical education. Practical approaches for improving students’ education of attention are proposed. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Central to teaching and assessing languages for specific purposes is collaboration between domain experts and applied linguists; yet, the complexity of the process has been little documented. A project involving collaboration between language testers, applied linguists and healthcare professionals in Australia provided an opportunity for exploration of this complexity. The project focused on interprofessional written communication about patient care, which forms the basis of a writing task in the Occupational English Test (OET), an English for Specific Purposes (ESP) test for health professionals. The project aimed to identify criteria indigenous to the work setting in order to inform the criteria used by language professionals in judging performance on the OET. This methodological paper examines the decisions involved in designing the collaboration and considers the possible effect of decisions on the validity of findings. The decisions include the choice of workplace writing tasks, of participants, of work settings and of written materials to be used as stimuli, the mode of eliciting responses to the stimuli from the domain experts and the coding and interpretation of data. The ways in which the research results are to be implemented in practice are examined, as well as the broader implications for the methodology of ESP research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]