Educational Perspectives

Abstract

Medical education encompasses a variety of learning goals that require unique training and assessment techniques to achieve success. A medical trainee must learn more than just facts; many situations in medicine require performance of skills and integration of knowledge in various clinical scenarios. The traditional experience-based model of medical education in which trainees learn in real time while providing patient care is advantageous because it is based in reality. However, actual experiences may vary substantially, making attempts to standardize education and assess an individual trainee’s acquisition of knowledge from the experience difficult. With increased emphasis on specific case loads and documentation of a variety of competencies, newer educational models are necessary to ensure the efficacy of medical education. One very helpful modality to address some of the challenges in medical education is video, which can be used as an educational tool throughout the learning process from provision of information to assessment of knowledge and skills. Video can be used to disseminate information, teaching a lesson to many individuals uniformly with the aid of action images. For example, the New England Journal of Medicine recently developed a series called “Videos in Clinical Medicine” that includes video demonstration of procedures and is available on the journal’s Web site. (1) Others have used video as an aid in teaching basic life support skills to students. (2) Video also can be useful in assessing a trainee’s attainment of knowledge, as in combination with Objective Structured Clinical Examinations or “Objective Structured Video Examination.” (3) Video assessment of educational experiences has been used in conjunction with simulators for medical training. (4)(5)(6) Finally, video can be used to assess performance comprehensively and objectively during actual patient encounters. Evaluation of videotaped performances was reported initially in 1969 when it was instituted in the emergency …