The Mastery Learning Medical Education Pathway

By: William C. McGaghie, PhD, professor of medical education, Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine In 2004, at Northwestern Memorial Hospital, we began a mastery learning program to train PGY-2 internal medicine residents in advanced cardiac life support (ACLS) team resuscitation skills. There is the perception that American Heart Association (AHA) provider courses–the traditional “gold standard” for ACLS education–are insufficient to prepare residents to respond to actual ACLS events. So we developed our mastery learning program. The sessions involve strong doses of deliberate practice by individuals and teams in a medical simulation laboratory with coaching, assessment, and feedback from engaged instructors. This is hard work. The residents sweat. Most meet or exceed the mastery standard within the usual eight-hour curriculum, but a handful need extra time (never more than one hour). The residents leave these training sessions tired but smiling because they know the experience has made them better doctors. Representative post-training comments from participants include: “Very good training with dedicated teachers. Beats the AHA course by 100%.” and “This was incredibly fantastic. I feel so much more prepared to lead a code. Thank you!” A frequent suggestion is to have refresher sessions throughout the year. What then is mastery learning in medical education? And how does it work? Mastery learning is a stringent form of competency-based...
Source: Academic Medicine Blog - Category: Universities & Medical Training Authors: Tags: Featured Guest Perspective deliberate practice graduate medical education mastery learning undergraduate medical education Source Type: blogs