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Objective: The COVID-19 pandemic made it necessary to convert a course on history taking, in theory and practice, to an online format over a very short time. A key question was whether, and if so to what extent, basic theory and, in particular, the practical skills required to conduct medical interviews can be learned online.
Methodology/project description: The teaching program in basic theory was didactically redesigned and asynchronously placed on a learning platform, while the practical program, which consisted of training in conducting history-taking interviews, took place with the help of video conferencing software during synchronous sessions. For the practical sessions, the lecturers received organizational and technical support.
Results: Based on initial evaluation results, a positive picture of the conversion has emerged since the course was completed. The need to restructure the course and use new teaching methods because of the COVID-19 pandemic was well accepted by lecturers and students, and the course content was successfully adapted to an online format.
Conclusion: Overall, the online format enabled the learning objectives of the course to be successfully achieved. For topics such as non-verbal communication, the evaluation results indicated that a classroom format is preferable. Asynchronous theory teaching was generally very well received. Blended learning formats thus represent an appropriate means of teaching how to conduct medical interviews. Overall, online courses on conducting medical interviews provide students with the opportunity to become acquainted with the use of digital formats to conduct doctor-patient interviews, and to develop the relevant skills.
An exploration of the relationship between recruitment communication and foraging in stingless bees
(2021)
Social information is widely used in the animal kingdom and can be highly adaptive. In social insects, foragers can use social information to find food, avoid danger, or choose a new nest site. Copying others allows individuals to obtain information without having to sample the environment. When foragers communicate information they will often only advertise high-quality food sources, thereby filtering out less adaptive information. Stingless bees, a large pantropical group of highly eusocial bees, face intense inter- and intra-specific competition for limited resources, yet display disparate foraging strategies. Within the same environment there are species that communicate the location of food resources to nest-mates and species that do not. Our current understanding of why some species communicate foraging sites while others do not is limited. Studying freely foraging colonies of several co-existing stingless bee species in Brazil, we investigated if recruitment to specific food locations is linked to 1) the sugar content of forage, 2) the duration of foraging trips, and 3) the variation in activity of a colony from 1 day to another and the variation in activity in a species over a day. We found that, contrary to our expectations, species with recruitment communication did not return with higher quality forage than species that do not recruit nestmates. Furthermore, foragers from recruiting species did not have shorter foraging trip durations than those from weakly recruiting species. Given the intense inter- and intraspecific competition for resources in these environments, it may be that recruiting species favor food resources that can be monopolized by the colony rather than food sources that offer high-quality rewards.
Aims: Inadequate treatment is one of the factors interfering with a successful social and working life. Among students, it can impair their health and learning progress. In the field of medicine the problem of inadequate treatment seems widespread. This study examines wether inadequate treatment in internships differs between medicine and other academic disciplines.
Method: Using a questionnaire, the frequency, forms and severity of inadequate treatment among students were compared between the disciplines of medicine, civil engineering and teaching.
Results: 69,3% of medical students reported inadequate treatment during their internships, about twice as many as students of other disciplines. The ratios of verbal, non-verbal and organisational inadequate treatment were similar between the different academic disciplines. However, medical students executed tasks without receiving sufficient safety precautions or training significantly more often (sevenfold) than students of other disciplines. In total however, the experienced incidents of inadequate treatment were seen as similarly severe across the different academic fields.
Conclusion: Inadequate treatment of students during internships is a larger problem in medicine than in civil engineering or teaching, particularly concerning the performance of unsafe tasks. With regard to the health of students and patients, inadequate treatment in the medical education should be tackled. Previous studies suggest that this goal can be achieved only through longtime extensive measures on the level of students, lecturers, faculty and teaching hospitals.