Cultivating a Thinking Surgeon: New Perspectives on Clinical Teaching, Learning and Assessment

Linda de Cossart MB ChM FRCS, Consultant Vascular Surgeon, Countess of Chester NHS Foundation Trust, Chester, UK

This book provides a classic supporting text for teachers and learners in the surgical field. The European Working Time Directive is just one of many factors that will radically change the way doctors work in the future. The aim of this book is to enable all those who teach young surgeons in the clinical setting to think about and prepare for a new and fresh approach to learning. The particular significance of this publication is that it makes a proper distinction between education and training, identifies the reasons why the postgraduate development of doctors as surgeons must involve education rather than merely training, and recognises that the education of surgeons must take place in the clinical setting. The book provides support in five areas: 1. It will enable surgical educators to develop on from the current and traditional teaching/learning relationship. 2. It takes as its basis the importance of professional values. 3. It provides for the first time a thorough educational framework, which will need to be utilised by the learner and educator to establish the educational focus of each trainee placement. 4. For the first time, it supports teachers and learners in developing the processes of reflective practice on a formal basis in surgical education. 5. It takes a new look at the assessment of the trainee in the light of new requirements and the needs of the new approaches to surgical education.

The significance of clinical practice in the education of a surgeon; Professional values and the traditions of practice in surgery; The importance in postgraduate medicine of educational clues, principles and aims; Nurturing the learner and supporting learning in the clinical settings; Assessment and its role in education for clinical practice: an overview; Understanding and developing clinical thinking; Assessing clinical thinking; Exploring the knowledge base of surgical practice; Assessing technical and operative procedures in the context of teaching and learning surgery; Developing and enriching surgical teaching and learning through practitioner research; Index.