Pondering over medical education in a desert

Abstract

This article was migrated. The article was not marked as recommended. As an external examiner for Alzaiem Alazhari University, Khartoum Sudan, I had an opportunity to discuss issues in family medicine training in Sudan. Besides the current task of raising eight thousand family physicians by barely ten full-fledged family physician educators, they are facing serious problems organizing effective training in the constant threats of brain drain facing the uncertainty and stability of the country. Some of the problems are much similar to the problems we face in our teaching environment as clinical educators; what is the best way to provide practical education at the bedside? How we do that? If there is any role for new technologies to boost our learning/teaching? If so, how?Our discussions with fledging faculty members in family medicine in Sudan went into numerous discussions in many different issues but one of them in particular caught me and pulled me into some deep reflection; how technology can help our medical education in resource poor settings? In reflecting this question, I realized what have happened in my training program. We put too much reliance to technologies and data rather than focusing on patients' complaints or our won examinations first. This habit of over-reliance of data and technologies sometimes mislead us to unfavorable outcomes in our patients. We certainly need a balance between technologies and hands-on clinical exam, and integration of these two seem to take some time in both in learners and educators. When I ponder over quality of clinical education, it seems that it does not really matter to me whether I am in resource-poor setting or not.