Short Story
Dr. Gerald P. Whelan, MD, FACEP was the special speaker at the 18th annual Geoffrey Bourne Memorial Lecture held on Monday, February 27 at the Geoffrey Bourne Lecture Hall, St. George’s University. The lecture, which was attended by SGU faculty and students was held under the theme, “Clinical Skills: Teaching to the Test or Teaching to the Practice?”.
The lecture aimed to discuss how the skills assessed in clinical skills assessment were intricately related to successful clinical practice, give an overview of changes in the design and administration of the USMLE Step 2 Clinical Skills (CS) Examination and the rationale for those changes and discuss approaches and strategies for students to best learn and refine clinical skills in a manner that encourages mastery of those skills beyond “teaching to the test”.
Dr. Whelan defined clinical skills as, “the set of skills needed to take knowledge and other procedural skills that one has as a physician and actually bring them to bear on a patient”. He put forward that clinical skills emerged as a result of a paradigm shift in medicine. He said that over the years, there has been a shift from doctor-centered care to a more patient-centered care to what is now known as a doctor-patient team. The significance of this shift has impacted the way in which medicine is delivered and ultimately received by patients. He stressed to the students in his audience that “The way you interact with patients is important. You can’t practice medicine without mastering clinical skills.” He stated that these skills are no longer optional, and it is for this reason the students need to get through the examination to prove that they have truly mastered the art of a ‘doctor-patient’ team.
Dr. Whelan emphasised the importance of teaching to prepare students for practicing medicine, as opposed to specifically for passing tests. However, he stressed that despite this, tests were of extreme importance. He stated: “We measure what we value. The USMLE examination is one that really mirrors reality and looks past the examination. This is teaching people the basic physician skills that they need to be the kind of practitioners that we all want, or will like our doctors to be.”
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Full Story
The Geoffrey H. Bourne Memorial Lecture is dedicated to the memory of Geoffrey H. Bourne, Phil, DSc (1909-1988), the first Vice Chancellor of St. George’s University (1978-1988). Dr. Bourne was an educator, scientist, writer and visionary. His professional life was spent largely in England and the United States, where he was Professor and Chairman of Anatomy at Emory University, Atlanta and then Director of the Yerkes Regional Primate Center at Emory.
As Vice Chancellor, Dr. Bourne played an outstanding role in the early development of St. George’s University, guiding its growth with a determined and steady hand.
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