Surgeons at UCL, Manchester and Edinburgh

30+.
Approx 12 at each of the three sites.

Likely to be June '99

Number of Sessions:

2-4 per month, lasting 1-2 hours on fridays.

Description of Course:

Two medical teaching situations are to be investigated. One concerns the updating and teaching of Senior House Officers (which is a Medical School responsibility), and the other the distributing special lectures and seminars between the three universities, and consequently facilitating wider discussion and interaction. One of the training rungs for clinicians is Senior House Officer (SHO).  Most of their training consists of hands-on experience looking after hospital patients, but formal teaching sessions are also necessary to clarify thinking and introduce material of which examples are not common in most hospitals.  This formal teaching is done by clinical discipline.  Each discipline, e.g., surgery, in a hospital may have relatively few SHOs (often 4-8).  The use of teaching resources (accommodation, senior clinicians as teachers, teaching aids) separately in every hospital is wasteful and inefficient, and teaching in isolation can become idiosyncratic.
In an attempt to mitigate these consequences, simultaneous teaching of SHOs at three different sites, each in a different region of the UK, will be carried out.  The sites are at Manchester, Edinburgh and UCL and the training/teaching will involve students from a number of hospitals in the respective regions. The frequency of these training sessions in the first instance will be twice per month, but this will be kept under review and would be made more frequent if the logistics prove favourable. The subject matter will include water and electrolyte balance, shock, burns, intestinal obstruction, peritonitis, chest injuries and the principals of intensive care, and all surgical issues concerned with accident and emergency procedures.
This teaching will take place at 3 sites initially, and will involve 10-12 students per site (small group room-based teaching). There will 2-4 sessions per month, each lasting 1-2 hours and they will take place on Friday afternoon.
The user interface will be investigated in two scenarios. Firstly analogue optical fibres will link the teaching space to the IP terminal, and in the second case the IP terminal will be located in the teaching space.  The main coordinator of this activity will be Dr Gordon Jameson (UCL), who has run the previous JTAP INSURRECT project from on which this collaboration is based.