Anaesthesia Education (Initiatives & Action plan; after SWOT)

Today our department had organised second meeting (after the previous one a month ago) and discussion for the next four years, what we are going to do after we finalised the list of things or outcomes we would like to see it happens. Some presentatives of nurse anaesthetists and technicians are also invited to participate the meeting.

In the undergraduate anaesthesia education team; we, the whole participants at the meeting, agreed to improve the way we teach our beloved medical students. The problem is we need to change our ways of thinking, we have only two weeks to teach them, but we cannot teach all aspects of our specialty, we do not have time to teach them to become a new anaesthetist, so we must change ourselves as well, just remember to teach them only the main objectives we have written before; such as preoperative evaluation and preparation, basic airway management skill, acute postoperative pain control, oxgen therapy. The way we communicate among ourselves should follow the principles of Medical education, we have to look back to OLE; objectives, learning process and evaluation.

Not only we have to change ourselves, we do have to emphasise these aforementioned objectives to our students as well, endotracheal intubation is not the only thing they should learn from us, they should seek their ways to gain more experience elsewhere during their time in other departments, endotracheal intubation is just the beginning part of anaesthetics administration; our medical students have to be well informed about this.

Our action plans include the emphasis of medical education among our consultants by either send newcomers to educate or invite education experts to our departments for fresh up our middle or senior consultants. Extend the medical student study time by the use of new media especially the electronic learning, so that we can assess the access and follow our students whether or not they log in and the process they have logged in. While the assessment of learning outcomes should be the self-assessment after they finish their time with us, especially three main skills; preoperative evaluation and preparation, open patient airway by mask and endotracheal intubations, also we have to see how they evaluate our department when they have graduate the medical school as well, how they judge us and think about competency in some skills such as CPR, lumbar puncture, and endotracheal intubation.

Time is running, the wind of change is coming.