Simulation teaching

The department has started teaching with a simulation based topic since the second term of 2011 academic year. We spent a half day morning session with two anaesthetic consultants, an anaesthetic nurse, a managing secretary with a technician together with a group of approximately ten medical students.

The main education purposes would be for the competency training for a life-threatening or crisis especially in surgical patients. The perioperative complications especially the cardiovascular and respiratory in origin are taught as a high priority.

Although we are the pioneer in teaching medical students with this high technology method, however, all equipment are belonged to the faculty and we look forwards to teaching in a simulation centre in the future.

Asia Pacific Meeting on Simulation in Healthcare

I am now in Hong kong, there is a first ever conference in education by the means of simulation in the region, and I am the only thai educator attending the conference up here. It is really an enjoyable experience and open the new horizons for me like the theme of this conference.

It is now in the process of getting a high fidelity simulator for an educational purpose in our department. Actually, we have employed a task based simulation practise for quite a long period of time, such as airway management, intravenous catheter placement, lumbar puncture and etc. So, this time would be a big step forwards by utilising a situation based education for Med students.

There is a long way to go because we have to finalise the instructive programme about what should be taught, although we have chosen some anaesthesia related crisis, but we have to write it down into steps as well before we begin to use it. It is going to be fun and very hardworking for us as a teamworking.

Here are some photographs taken here in this asian world city.

Thailand Quality Award

Actually, Thailand Quality Award has nothing to do with medical education, but many institutions not only in business adopt the process endorsed by the TQA to facilitate and improve the quality in many ways. Therefore, higher education cannot be shielded away from this, and the Ministry of Education has passed a law to ensure that every course has to follow a guideline to improve quality in every programme in all universiies across the Kingdom.

On April 26th, we the undergraduate anaesthesia education team had met and tried to draft our first version for the SIAS501 subject for MS anaesthesia education. It may not be perfect yet, and we have many more to do when we follow the guideline throughoutly, and that is the way ahead to ensure that our students achieve the best quality education.

Teaching skills to med students; Venepuncture

On Monday and Tuesday, there was a class arranged for new 4th year medical students, after finishing their third year they had to learn some basic skills before starting their clinical education.



The department of Anesthesiology was asked to help teach the skills as well as staffs from other department, we participated in teaching venepuncture skill on those two days. Some of them were excited, afraid, or even terrified when they knew that they would have to practise real human venepuncture with their colleagues. Indeed, there were some students getting syncope!


The main mistakes during venepuncture practice were not tight touniquet, the needle puncture was not deep enough to penetrate the wall of forearm veins, and they forgot to release the touniquet before they drew back the needle, so there was always blood leaking out and felt syncope.




Although it was a painful experience, however, they had to know and learn that otherwise they would not concern when they have to do or perform with the real humans. For me, it was a really enjoyable experience teaching this skill.

Department Education Conference

We, the staffs of our beloved department, gathered together to share and discuss about the education for medical students and our residents. It is a must for the department to follow according to quality assurance of education (Thai Qualifications Framework for Higher Education; TQF: HEd), that every single year 80% of the staffs must attend a conference to plan, follow and review for every course. Although it may not be able to achieve a goal of 80%, but the attmosphere inside the deparment conference room is great. Creative ideas are suggested, listened and get a review.

From the undergraduate team, the theme was "What can we give to medical students?". We have to focus on the main subject, SIAS 501; that we have to teach our students, we change the topics of lectures, and case studies. We hoped that simulation will start real soon so that we can use this type of education to teach the crisis management especially anaesthesia related complications. We have checklists for medical students for bedside teaching so that every staff can have an idea what we can discuss and talk to our students.

In an era of modern technology and internet, we will definitely apply the internet, and paperless for education for the medical students, lectures and powerpoint files will be added in the the e-learning platform by the hospital database.

For the residents, we discuss about rotation change, types of education that may work well with adult education.

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.

How to get start

As we are searching for the curriculum elsewhere for our beloved medical students, we ran across "The Anaesthesia UK" site, it shows common questions about the role of anaesthetists as a profession. It can envision our medical students every routine day what we really do or care for our patients.

Be informed from this lovely website link. Access to the site by the title link.