Abdus Salam Khan, MD FACP – December, 2015
EMAG conducted the landmark examination workshop last weekend. International Medical Exam (IMEX) workshop was thought out by EMAG to help young and ambitions doctors in their international examination. Because of our old fashioned system in healthcare our physicians go through tough time when they have to appear in international exams. These exams expect doctors to be proficient in conducting medical encounters utilizing best practices and excellent communication skills.
Unfortunately in our medical Schools as well as most of the hospitals we don’t teach these skills. So when our graduates are faced with these exams they have to struggle a lot despite their more than adequate fund of knowledge. These doctors struggle and sometime, they have to change their plans or other times delay till they get some insight on how to appear and pass these examinations.
Emergency Medicine advisory group realized their gap and started working on ways to overcome this weakness in the interested Physicians. This present activity of EMAG was on similar lines. To make people aware of best practices, to help them understand what is important, to give them a taste of exam scenario and to give them a chance to practice and act out, so they realize their good and bad areas and help them improve.
This activity was created with utmost efforts on details to match it close to how international exams are been conducted. We used actors and created actual scenes for the examinees. We helped them understand the sequence that is expected of them and practices and communication skills that can get them through.
The feedback of examination was good and reflected their confidence in our teaching. The EMAG volunteers and staff is commended for all their efforts to make it a success.
The medical and the healthcare system throughout the world has been transformed entirely and we also have to adjust ourselves accordingly. We require meticulous efforts to change at basic level and to our way of communication. We also need to develop our ethics and medical decision making algorithm based upon our cultural and religious norms and propagate them. It is worthy enough to mention that with new developments in medical field our patients gain more autonomy and adjustment have to be made in the system to accommodate practices of individual patients and balance it against the possible benefit to the patients. So the modern medicine is about accommodation for our patients beliefs and customs rather than thinking of them as hindrance.
This practice of tolerance and accommodating our patients result in better patient doctor relationship, adherence of patients to doctors advice and ultimately better outcome and patient satisfaction. Through this course we need to disseminate this culture of improving outcome through inculcating evidence based and tested skills and accommodating our patients concerns into our practices.
Feel free to get in touch with me on askhan65@yahoo.com.