Croaking the PHROGs

There‘s an interesting editorial in this week's BMJ: (By the way, PHROG indicates basing education on prejudices, hunches, opinions and guesses rather than evidence).

Commentary: The challenges of systematic reviews of educational research. Jill Morrison

BMJ 2005:391, doi:10.1136/bmj.331.7513.391 (She is commenting on this article: Early practical experience and the social responsiveness of clinical education: systematic review. Sonia Littlewood, Valmae Ypinazar, Stephen A Margolis, Albert Scherpbier, John Spencer, Tim Dornan

BMJ 2005:387-391, doi:10.1136/bmj.331.7513.387 Abstract Full text). A snip:

Littlewood et al present the results of a systematic review of the evidence in the medical education literature about how early experience contributes to the basic education of health professionals.1 Increasingly, emphasis is being given to basing decisions about teaching practice on evidence because the alternative is the PHOG approach: prejudices, hunches, opinions and guesses.2 The review was carried out under the auspices of the Best Evidence Medical Education (BEME, www.bemecollaboration.org) collaboration, which aims to promote best evidence medical education through dissemination of information, producing systematic reviews and the creation of an evidence based culture. It attempts to synthesise the available evidence in a format that can be used by curriculum planners and others involved in medical education to enable them to make decisions about how to provide the best learning opportunities for students.





[We] are accustomed to a rather different kind of systematic review that predominantly evaluates the results of a number of randomised controlled trials... Full text

Another good section: What the educators are saying. Particularly of interest:

Lambert Schuwirth

BMJ 2005:392, doi:10.1136/bmj.331.7513.392 Full text

This post courtesy of Anne Taylor-Vaisey.