Normative Views of Medical Reasoning and Decision-Making

Summary:

• Formal theories of decision making can sometimes be used to solve specific medical problems
• In any case they can inform and guide good medical practice
• Variations that ignore the basic principles can be misleading

 [Presentation (21.3 KB) ]

Patient Safety and Medical Error

Summary:

An emerging consensus of empirical data suggests that about 1 in 10 patients are harmed as a result of their hospitalisation The performance and the errors of clinicians are determined by multiple factors:

• Individual
• Clinical team
• Local healthcare setting/environment
• National regulations.

This ‘systems approach’ has been used to model surgeons’ performance, with very promising initial results.

 [Presentation (219 KB) ]

Ability and Performance in Medical School and Beyond

Summary:

• Passing medical examinations - and hence knowing more about diagnosis, treatment and management - (i) relates little to intelligence (ii) relates to previous educational achievement (perhaps reflects motivation; perhaps reflects underlying knowledge structure).

• Medical knowledge grows but (i) it does not just grow from ignorance to knowledge, and (ii) sometimes it goes through a phase of being systematically wrong.

 [Presentation (1.73 MB) ]

Understanding Medical Thinking: the Judgment Analysis Approach

Summary:

Introduction to judgement analysis, an approach to understanding decision-making that dates back to innovative work by Egon Brunswik in the middle decades of the 20th century, and its application in healthcare.

Medical Image Perception

Summary:

Introduction to the interpretation of images by radiologists.