- College of Medicine Faculty News
The UCF College of Medicine’s participation in the development of a national database of online instruction in psychiatry helped win the 2011 “Outstanding Innovation in Medical Education Poster Award” from the Association of Directors of Medical Student Education in Psychiatry (ADMSEP).
Dr. Martin Klapheke, professor of Psychiatry at the College of Medicine, and co-chair of the Clinical Simulation Initiative (CSI) Task Force for ADMSEP, helped initiate the process of developing online videos that teach medical students about mental health issues such as teen depression, dementia, delirium, and bipolar disorder.
Dr. Klapheke and his colleagues are having the modules peer reviewed and plan to submit them to MedEdPORTAL, making them available online as a free national database for use by medical schools across the country. Dr. Klapheke and the CSI Task Force have produced five modules so far and plan to produce a total of 14 that encompass the major disorders in Psychiatry.
“These modules utilize educational technology and state-of-the-art simulation in a most effective way for educators and students,” Dr. Klapheke said.
The Liaison Committee on Medical Education (LCME), which accredits medical schools, requires third- and fourth-year students to learn through actual clinical experiences. Finding a sufficiently broad variety of such experiences at available clinical placement sites for students can at times be a challenge. As Dr. Klapheke explained, a medical student in a six-week psychiatric rotation may well see multiple patients with depression, but might not see sufficient patients with more uncommon disorders. “These self-learning modules can help fill in those gaps,” he said.
Dr. Klapheke’s module was filmed in the College of Medicine’s Clinical Skills and Simulation Center, where standardized patients received scripts detailing their symptoms. During the self-learning module, students see video clips showing how a psychiatrist interviews and interacts with the patient. These interactive modules have students take a series of quizzes to test their learning, offers feedback on their answers, and allows them to study at their own pace.
Dr. Klapheke and the CSI group showed the modules on laptop computers at the ADMSEP conference: “People were waiting in line to get a look at them. It was a delight to get name recognition for UCF and for both the College of Medicine’s Educational Technology staff and Clinical Skills and Simulation Center.”
Dr. Klapheke credited Dale Voorhees, director of learning systems, who filmed and edited the training videos, and Alex Chacon, classroom support specialist, for the graphics and design of the winning poster. “This was a team effort,” he said. “Dale, Alex and the Clinical Skills team did a spectacular job.”