IAMSE Call for Journal Reviewers

Dear member of IAMSE,

For our online journal Medical Science Educator, I am currently looking for new reviewers to join the Review Board. Several of you are a reviewer with us already and your work is highly appreciated. If you are not a reviewer yet, I want to make you more familiar with the possibility to become one, which is an exclusively membership benefit.

Medical Science Educator publishes articles which focus on teaching the sciences that are fundamental to modern medicine and health. Coverage includes basic science education, clinical teaching and the incorporation of modern educational technologies. Our journal is experiencing an increasing interest from educators from all over the world to publish with us.

Our reviewers are expected to have a broad interest in medical education. We will try to match the manuscript topic to your field of interest or expertise, but this is not always possible. Although expertise in the field is always helpful, the most important goal of our peer review is to judge the manuscript for its quality and appropriateness to be published in our journal and to provide the authors useful feedback. This is done using a standardized review form. Reviews have to be returned within 3 weeks, and we will try to limit the number of times per year we will invite you to review for us. For the professional development of our reviewers, we offer a review workshop during the IAMSE annual meeting, free of charge. This year this workshop will be organized on Saturday June 13, 2015 at the meeting in San Diego, CA, USA. Our reviewers are expected to be IAMSE members in good standing, so we hope that you maintain your active membership.

If you are interested in becoming a reviewer, or if you have any questions regarding the Review Board, please contact me on journal@iamse.org. I look forward to working with you.

Peter GM de Jong, PhD
Editor-in-Chief

IAMSE WAS Spring Week 4

"Designing, Implementing, and Evaluating Continuing Interprofessional Education (CIPE) Activities   Using a Systematic Planning Process"  

Presenter: John Owen

March 19, 2015 12:00 – 1:00 pm ET.

Continuing interprofessional education (CIPE) has become increasing important due in part to the recognition that interprofessional education (IPE) is an important component of the suggested changes in traditional continuing education (CE) to increase health professionals’ ability to improve outcomes of care. A CIPE planning process will be presented to help guide CE professionals to develop, implement, and evaluate CIPE programs. This planning process involves a step-by-step procedure for integrating IPE into the existing CE planning process, and will be illustrated with an example of a CIPE program completed at the University of Virginia to improve sepsis care by enhancing healthcare team collaboration.

 Have you registered yet for the WAS Spring 2015 series? There is still space left, so please join us!

Click here to register!

Upcoming sessions:

“Transforming Health Disparities Through Interprofessional Education, Research and Service”                  – Memoona Hasnain

   March 26, 2015 12:00 – 1:00 pm ET.

IAMSE Publications Committee Journal Review

The International Association of Science Educators (IAMSE) since 2011 publishes articles in the journal Medical Science Educator but previously published articles in the Journal of the International Association of Science Educators (JIAMSE). I wanted to share with you an interesting article that studies whether a human patient simulator improves long-term retention of autonomic facts from one the archived articles from JIAMSE 19 (3): 89-93.

As educators we are always looking for novel approaches to improve long term memory of the material we consider relevant. The paper I will briefly review was published in 2009 by Drs Kasaturi, Heimburger, Nelson, Phero and Millard from the University of Cincinnati Medical School and their work described the use of a human patient simulator for learning Pharmacology concepts and principles.

The study described 26 second year medical students that were provided case-based clinical scenarios with questions to be answered that were related to these cases. The students were to answer the questions prior to the beginning of the study. Half of the students were placed in the computerized human patient simulator group and the rest were the control group. The control group discussed the cases with a trained facilitator in a small group (similar to discussion of cases as was previously done in this course) and the other group worked only with the human patient simulator (SimMan). This patient simulator was programmed to simulate a patient’s cardiopulmonary symptoms and physiological responses to various autonomic pharmaceutical interventions for each of the scenarios covered. Evaluation of their learning of the material was tested using USMLE style questions selected from a test bank used by the University School of Medicine 1, 5, 22 and 33 weeks after studying the information.

The scores on the standardized test administered at various times after being taught the material did not reveal any significant benefit using the human patient simulator approach. Interestingly the authors suggested that a different assessment method for evaluating students’ retention might have uncovered a significant improvement in retention using case scenarios and a patient simulator that were not detected using paper-based examinations.

This review of an archived paper like this one hopefully shows you how IAMSE works to support medical education by  improving the quality of learning for our students.
Remember that you can access this article and many others at www.iamse.org by using the link to Publications-Medical Science Educator and click on Archives.

Dan Schulze
Associate Professor of Microbiology and Immunology
University of Maryland School of Medicine
Baltimore MD 21201

2015 Slate for IAMSE Board of Director

Dear IAMSE Members,

I am pleased to present the Nominating Committee's slate of candidates for the 2015 election of members for the Board of Directors of the International Association of Medical Science Educators (IAMSE). In accordance with our bylaws, the committee has delivered these names and supporting materials for posting to our website. I now invite you to review the individuals and their qualifications.
Click Here

This information will remain posted throughout the month of February, and on March 1st an electronic ballot will be activated. At that time, IAMSE members in good standing will be invited to select four (4) of the candidates for the position of Director.

Write-in candidates will be accepted until Monday, February 16th. To qualify for nomination by petition, each candidate must have the support of at least 15 IAMSE members in good standing. All petitions and letters must be addressed to and received by the Association Manager on or before midnight Eastern Time (GMT-5).

Julie K. Hewett, CMP
IAMSE Association Manager