Word: testing
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...study, published Thursday in Science, makes a strong case that the second theory is the right one. A team of anthropologists from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, developed a battery of learning tests they call the Primate Cognition Test Battery, and gave it to 106 chimps, 105 children and 32 orangutans, to compare the groups directly. Says Esther Hermann, a co-author of the paper: "It's the first time anything like this has been done...
...communication were strongly correlated to the number of patient complaints they had racked up in their first years of practice. Overall, the 3,424, physicians had 1,116 complaints among them, of which 696 were deemed valid after medical-authority investigation. The physicians who scored low on the test - the poor communicators, who were, say, condescending, judgmental or flippant in their behavior - had generated a disproportionate number of those complaints. Doctors with scores in the bottom quartile on the test's communication-related portion had 70% more legitimate complaints per year of practice than the top-quartile performers; the poor...
...current JAMApaper is the first to measure how accurately a standardized test can evaluate doctors' skills and how effectively those grades can predict future patient-complaint rates. According to the study's authors, when patients complain in the U.S. and Canada, it's most often about doctors? communication or attitude problems, rather than, say, quality-of-care issues or office screw-ups. And plenty of past studies have shown a link between lousy doctor communication and poor medical outcomes, such as inadequate care and malpractice suits...
...that doctors know the exam works pretty well, maybe more countries will put it to use. When Canada first mandated that doctors pass the communication test for licensure, it was the only country in the world to do so - and the move was seen as controversial. Since then, the U.S. licensing system has also introduced a clinical skills exam, which every domestic and foreign medical school graduate must pass. Robyn Tamblyn, the lead author of the JAMA paper and a professor of medicine at McGill, thinks the test ought to be given even earlier than that. Why have doctors slog...
While few physicians or educators doubt that communication matters, many people question how well you can test something as subjective as communication - especially when every new doctor must complete the exam on a single given day, no matter how grouchy he or she feels. But both the Canadians and the Americans have gone to great lengths to ensure their tests are fair, says Tamblyn. Her study shows that the predictive power of such exams holds irrespective of the doctors' gender or whether they went to med school in another country. "It's a good-news story," says Tamblyn...