Clinical reasoning is a complex set of abilities healthcare students have to learn during their studies and continue to further develop in the workplace. Clinical reasoning encompasses the application of knowledge to collect and integrate information from various sources to arrive at a diagnosis and management plan for patients in a shared decision-making process. Due to its multifactorial nature and unconscious components it is both, difficult to learn and teach.A lack of clinical reasoning abilities is a primary cause of cognitive errors in patient care and threats to patient safety including unnecessary pain, treatments, or procedures for patients and increasing the costs of healthcare (Graber 2005). In the European Union the number of errors and adverse events in healthcare is estimated at 8-12% (WHO). Despite the importance of clinical reasoning for the workplace of healthcare professionals and patient safety there is still a lack of structured and explicit teaching, learning, and assessment of clinical reasoning in healthcare education (Rencic 2017). Such a training can help to improve patient safety and reduce costs - two priorities of the EU Health policy.Therefore, the aim of this project is to fill this gap and conceptualize, develop, evaluate, and disseminate a clinical reasoning curriculum in healthcare education for students and a train-the-trainer course for educators on how to teach clinical reasoning.Both, the train-the-trainer course and the student curriculum will leverage best practices in instruction and assessment and clinical reasoning theory and combine online and face-to-face teaching components to achieve optimal learning effects. To facilitate dissemination, the curriculum will be adaptable to existing curricula, enabling curriculum managers and educators to adopt it in a step-wise approach and integrate it into existing courses. This process will be supported by publishing guidelines.
Our was to conceptualize, develop, evaluate, and disseminate a CR curriculum in healthcare education for students and educators. Our objectives were(1) identifying the needs and preoccupations for a structured and longitudinal teaching and assessment of CR.(2) improving education in the health professions with a CR curriculum and supporting educators in teaching and assessing CR. (3) disseminating and sustaining the developed courses and material as open educational resources.
Clinical reasoning (CR) is a complex set of abilities healthcare students have to learn during their studies and further develop in the workplace. It encompasses the application of knowledge to collect and integrate information to arrive at a diagnosis and management plan for patients and is difficult to learn and teach. Despite the importance of CR for patient safety there is a lack of structured and explicit teaching, learning, and assessment of CR in healthcare education.
<< Background >> Clinical reasoning (CR) is a complex set of abilities healthcare students have to learn during their studies and further develop in the workplace. It encompasses the application of knowledge to collect and integrate information to arrive at a diagnosis and management plan for patients and is difficult to learn and teach. Despite the importance of CR for patient safety there is a lack of structured and explicit teaching, learning, and assessment of CR in healthcare education. << Objectives >> Our was to conceptualize, develop, evaluate, and disseminate a CR curriculum in healthcare education for students and educators. Our objectives were(1) identifying the needs and preoccupations for a structured and longitudinal teaching and assessment of CR.(2) improving education in the health professions with a CR curriculum and supporting educators in teaching and assessing CR. (3) disseminating and sustaining the developed courses and material as open educational resources. << Implementation >> With a needs analysis based on a survey and interviews, we identified a lack of structured and explicit CR training in European healthcare education, barriers, and preoccupations. Based on that we developed a didactical framework theme-based student curriculum and the TTT course. The framework served as a blueprint for interprofessional groups developing the 32 learning units (LU), which were partly piloted. Based on the pilot results we refined the LUs and developed an integration guideline. << Results >> The main results of DID-ACT are:- Needs analysis incl. how to tackle identified barriers and preoccupations- Curricular framework- TTT course incl. a course certificate- Adaptable student curriculum on CR incl. OERs- Long-term integration plans at partner institutions- Evaluation toolkit and results of pilots- Integration guideline to support educators in implementing the curriculum- Sustainability model - Website, learning management platform, scientific publications and conferences