Paper: Patel et al. (2009) Clinical complexity and medical education

The following item about a paper from last year was posted by Rakesh Biswas on the COMPLEXITY-PRIMARY-CARE list. After Rakesh's comments I have included a quotation.

The paper in question by Patel, et al. will be an important reference for me, even though the definition of domain and discipline remains problematic. (A glossary for the health career model will follow on the new site.)

Suddenly, the passing of time is also clear given that:

Shortcliffe, E.H. (et al.) Ed. (1990) A History of Medical Informatics, Wokingham, Addison-Wesley Publishing Co.

- appeared twenty years ago. Ten years ago I cited Shortcliffe et al..

Twenty years! How long is that in technology / internet terms?

The bold text below is my emphasis:

From: Rakesh Biswas
To: COMPLEXITY-PRIMARY-CARE@JISCMAIL.AC.UK
Sent: Thu, 12 August, 2010 16:41:06
Subject: Clinical complexity and medical education

As our society progresses in the accumulation of knowledge and as the complexity of this knowledge increases, it becomes more important to determine how to structure education to provide individuals with the most comprehensive base of knowledge without sacrificing either depth and complexity or broadness of material.

Human beings have an extraordinary capacity for storing large volumes of organized information in memory. How does one apply such detailed knowledge to practical, real-world problems and situations?

What is the optimal mode of learning that will promote flexibility and transfer of general knowledge across domains during problem-solving?

For more, see the article by Dr Patel whose focus area is Medical Cognition (how doctors think and develop their so called expertise).

Regards,
Rakesh

Here is a quote from the paper:

Much of the early research in the study of reasoning in domains such as medicine was carried out in laboratory or experimental settings. There has been a shift in more recent years toward examining cognitive issues in naturalistic medical settings, such as medical teams in intensive care units [2], anesthesiologists working in surgery[89], nurses providing emergency telephone triage [90], and reasoning with technology by patients [91] in the health care system. This research was informed by work in the area of dynamic decision-making [92], complex problem-solving [93], human factors [94,95], and cognitive engineering [44]. Naturalistic studies reshaped researchers’ views of human thinking, as expressed in ‘‘situativity” theory’s terms (as described in Section 2.1.4) [23–26], by shifting the onus of cognition from being the unique province of the individual to being distributed across social and technological contexts. p.186.

Whilst as Rakesh points out Dr. Patel's focus is medical cognition, then through the health career model it would appear my interest is nursing cognition. As per the legacy of models of nursing - which did recognize the patient through the concept of patiency (Stevens, 1979) - we realise that now all disciplines must demand much more of their respective models in the 21st century.

Patel, V.L., et al. (2009) Cognitive and learning sciences in biomedical and health instructional design: A review with lessons for biomedical informatics education, Journal of Biomedical Informatics, 42, 176–197.
doi:10.1016/j.jbi.2008.12.002

Stevens, B.J. (1979) Nursing Theory: Analysis, Application, Evaluation. Boston: Little, Brown and Company.