If you or someone you know plans meetings for pharmaceutical companies, you/they might want to check out the Pharmaceutical Meeting Planners Forum, scheduled for March 31 to April 1 at the Doubletree Philadelphia. Medical Meetings is partnering with the Center for Business Intelligence have launched  to give mid- to senior-level meeting planners the opportunity to discuss hot issues including how to plan successful events that are in compliance with the Office of Inspector General’s pharma guidance and other regulations; how to work productively with procurement departments and third-party meeting planning companies; and how to communicate effectively with brand managers. For more information, call (781) 939-2438 or (800) 817-8601, send e-mail to cbireg@cbinet.com, or visit www.cbinet.com.

Anne Taylor-Vaisey asked an interesting question of her CE Awareness Yahoo group that I thought would be good to ask here as well.

In the four months since Capsules started, Anne and I have posted 255 items. That’s almost 64 per month, on average, and most included links to other articles or resources. As Anne asked her CE group, I’ll ask you: “What did we do with all this information? Did we read it all? File away the messages in electronic folders? Print some of it out and file it in paper files? Forget about it? How much did we actually get out of all this stuff? What did we do with the ideas we got while reading at least some of the messages?”

Anne says she captured most of the citations in a Reference Manager database, and most of the PDFs in a folder on my hard drive. She then linked citations to articles so that she has a nice searchable database with links to full text. Then she asks, “But so what? I can find things again, but what happened to all the ideas I got when I initially found these treasures? I may have bibliographic control, but what about idea control?

“How do we move from ‘digital stockpiling,’ which is what most of us do, to saving and sharing the ‘gems’ and converting them to ‘job-ready knowledge’?”

In the hope of making this a better resource for all, I’d love to know what you have learned from this site, and what, if anything, you’ve done with what you learned. Please take a moment to e-mail me your response, or leave it in the comments section below. Thanks!

The Bell Curve, an article published in the New Yorker a few weeks ago, is an eye-opening look by surgeon Atul Gawande at what’s really going on in terms of physician competencies–and he finds a big bell curve, with a few supremely competent and supremely incompetent on either end, and the vast majority being mediocre. Gawande also thoughtfully explores what makes the excellent excel–and it flies in the face of everything we think we know about evidence-based medicine. The physician bloggers have had a lot to say about it as well.

For example, A Chance to Cut is a Chance to Cure concludes that, "We should strive to improve ourselves, to narrow the gap between ‘average’  and ‘excellent’ so that is insignificant." (And check out the comments on his post–very interesting!) MedMusings delves into the "art of medicine" vs. evidence-based:

"On one hand it points to the importance of pushing the therapies with the best evidence backing it up, but on the other, the fanaticism that it takes to provide care that optimizes the outcomes beyond what can be expected from following guidelines.

For me, what i took away from the article was not that i need to espouse extra-canonical treatments, but that i really need to care deeply about my patients, and elicit as much honesty from them as possible.

How do you teach that level of caring, not just care, in CME? There’s a kind-of-related post on this at The Cheerful Oncologist, who concludes a discussion on pain management with, "Pain consumes a person’s spirit and wraps itself around the waking mind like iron chains. It robs the sufferer of the ability to accomplish tasks, or even interact with loved ones. Pain is evil. Having written this, I shall pledge to always remember what it was like to be in pain, as I pledge to remember what the good men and women in my care are going through on this day, and the many evenings to come."

For more related to this topic, read the article referenced in Anne’s post earlier today.

Here’s a good spot to find out who’s speaking on what topic at some of the upcoming CME provider meetings, and for submission deadlines. Thanks to of Anne Taylor-Vaisey for the pointer.

To comment on this post, click on “comments” below. To receive a weekly update, e-mail Sue.

There are a lot of recent additions to the Society for Academic CME’s News for Medical & Adult Educators page. The even better news is that even non-members can access it. Thanks to of Anne Taylor-Vaisey for letting me know it’s been updated.

To comment on this post, click on “comments” below. To receive a weekly update, e-mail Sue.

The American Society for Association Executives just released its latest salary survey. Since the largest proportion of those surveyed are employed with medical/heathcare organizations (16 percent), I thought this might be of interest. The news ain’t great, though.

To receive a weekly update, e-mail Sue.

Thanks to Anne Taylor-Vaisey for the reminder about the AAMC meeting next week (Nov. 7-10) in Boston. If you’re going, check the schedule, available online here. For links to the RIME abstracts, click here. For more on the SACME fall 2004 program that will be held in conjunction with AAMC, click here.

I’m so excited to be able to attend this year. I hope to be able to meet some of you in Boston next week!

To comment on this post, click on “comments” below. To receive a weekly update, e-mail Sue.

Thanks to Anne Taylor-Vaisey for the reminder about the AAMC meeting next week (Nov. 7-10) in Boston. If you’re going, check the schedule, available online here. For links to the RIME abstracts, click here. For more on the SACME fall 2004 program that will be held in conjunction with AAMC, click here.

I’m so excited to be able to attend this year. I hope to be able to meet some of you in Boston next week!

To comment on this post, click on “comments” below. To receive a weekly update, e-mail Sue.

Interesting article on Scotsman.comabout women in the workforce. Specifically, it looks at the notion that just getting “women into those high-status jobs from which tradition, culture, nepotism and prevailing imagery debar them and, bingo, they ll get paid more.” Not going to work, the writer says, using the medical field as an example.

Another, much larger problem with the aim of trying to feminise male-dominated professions is the likelihood that as soon as the gender balance has shifted, the given profession will get devalued. That is exactly what has happened in medicine, according to Dr Carol Black - only the second woman in 500 years to serve as president of the Royal College of Physicians.



Over the past 20 years, women have become well represented among the higher ranks of medicine, as consultants, hospital managers and in the analytical field of medical education. And at university level, female medical students now outnumber males by 61% to 39%. Black, one would have presumed, would be cheering.




But last August she went public with a controversial plea for more men to enter medicine in order to reverse its decline in status. What she didn t say - but what was clearly implied - was that if her plea was heeded, in the future there would be less room in medicine for women.

This post courtesy of Anne Taylor-Vaisey:

We could all use a reminder about how to design effective written materials, patient/health-related or not. Here is a useful article from the latest issue of Disability and Rehabilitation.

ATV

Hoffmann T, Worrall L. Designing effective written health education materials: considerations for health professionals. Disabil Rehabil 2004; 26(19):1166-1173.

PURPOSE: Written health education materials can only be effective if they can be read, understood, and remembered by patients. The purpose of this article was to review the literature about features that should be incorporated into written health education materials to maximize their effectiveness, identify where there is consensus and debat! e about which features should be incorporated, and develop recommendations that health professionals can use when reviewing their existing materials and designing new materials.

METHOD: Literature review of published research and education articles.

RESULTS: There is a large number of features that need to be considered when designing written health education materials so that they are suitable for the target audience and effective. Although there is consensus about the majority of features that should be included, further research is needed to explore the contribution of certain features, such as illustrations, to the effectiveness of written materials and the effect of well-designed written materials on patient outcomes.

CONCLUSIONS: Health professionals need to provide their patients with written health education materials that are patient-orientated and designed according to the best practice principles in written health education material design.

PubMed

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This post courtesy of Anne Taylor-Vaisey:

The abstracts for the Summer 2004 issue of the Journal of Continuing Education in the Health Professions 2004;24(3) are now available through PubMed.

If you have an online subscription, through either EBSCO Publishing or BC Decker, you can access full text directly from PubMed by clicking Links then LinkOut: