Changing facets of anaesthesia education!

Undergraduate teaching of anaesthesia in India is constrained by the inadequate student contact hours compared with those of other disciplines. Final year students are taught the basic skills of life support such as bag and mask ventilation, cardiopulmonary resuscitation and intravenous cannulation. More specialized skills such as endotracheal intubation and spinal anaesthesia are
desirable areas of instruction. Faculty need to provide positive role models for the students in learning anaesthesia. Although anaesthesiologists are involved in many educational activities, the focus is oriented only towards postgraduate training. Common issues include the selection, training and assessment of residents. Selection processes may be improved by incorporating psychological and psychomotor measures. A limited number of teaching methods, especially simulators, have generated much interest, while other traditional methods, such as bedside
teaching, have been neglected over the years. Newer methods of evaluation, for example, daily assessment by the attending faculty, have been described, but work continues to be needed on these and older methods, such as oral examinations. Programs of recertification or maintenance of competence, which have been announced by certifying bodies, may place new emphasis on the
study of the design, effectiveness, and outcome of continuing medical education. Emphasis in the postgraduate training programmes should be to provide trainees with clinical experiences and stimulation that will develop the required traditional competencies. It should also cultivate competency in clinical decision-making, intuition and judgement. This could be accomplished by developing an experiential curriculum. The basic premise is that learning is a process and its outcome is to a large extent related to what the learner does. The process begins with an experience that provides for observation and reflection. Integration of the thoughts provides the basis for executing either existing or new actions. In the experiential curriculum postgraduate
training and learning are enhanced by documenting and critically evaluating the experiences to which the postgraduate student is exposed. Included within such a structured programme are the methodologies of problembased and evidence-based learning. Faculty development will be required to help the postgraduate student pursue these skills of self-evaluation and efficient learning. Incorporation of an experiential curriculum into the residency training programme will achieve the goals listed above and allow maturation of the process of lifelong learning. It will also allow greater achievement of the application of new information to one’s practice. In conclusion, there are many opportunities for anaesthesiologists to conduct educational research into many traditional and new areas of medical education.