Problem Based Attending Rounds

Abstract

Clinical clerkships are a vital link between basic cognitive information and its application in real patient care situations. However, studies have repeatedly shown deficiencies of attending physicians in promoting understanding of the application of basic science information to clinical problems, promoting the development of clinical skills and providing constructive feedback on student's clinical abilities. Problem based attending rounds (PBAR) is an educational process which attending physicians can follow to overcome these deficiencies despite the complexity of actual patients and time constraints of patient care activities. In PBAR, one student presents a short patient profile, a complete current problem list and then selects one problem to present. Then the student presents only those data pertinent to that problem in the SOAP format of the problem oriented medical record. After the patient profile and subjective data, students offer early diagnostic hunches and anticipate physical findings and poss...