Medical students – get help passing and revise for your medical student exams with our multi choice questions (MCQs/EMQs), videos, podcasts and downloads. Free resources give it a trial!
Today we look at renal function as requested on a blood test and the eGFR, which is now in vogue for measurement of a patient’s baseline renal function.
The NSF recommends that kidney function should be assessed and monitored using an eGFR, rather than serum creatinine concentration alone, in people identified as having an increased risk of chronic kidney disease.
The sad news reported today of the death of Jade Goody from cervical cancer has been widely reported.
A number of British Media sites have covered the news which has made headlines on both sides of the Atlantic, and also in Asia.
Jade Goody, who died in the early hours of March 22nd, 2009 of cervical cancer
Whilst some of the reporting has been at times in questionable taste (Source: Guardian Unlimited) it has reinforced the issue of media influences on public awareness of screening programmes. Its widely been reported in the British press of the increase in uptake of cervical cancer screening in many age groups.
Its sparked debate amongst the Medical Community, read the comments on the BMJ website here.
Other News Outlets have covered the story.
Read from the BBC here
The Telegraph here
The Guardian here
The Washington Post Here
Reuters (UK) Here
The Times of India in the days leading up to her death here
Whilst the debate will continue regarding the life and death of Jade Goody, the influences on health care policy and public opinion should not be underestimated. It’s 4 days ago the Press Association and the BBC reported on the petition to cut the age of cervical cancer screening to 18 in the United Kingdom.
After customer feedback we have just completed an upgrade which mean our videos should run smoother and stream more quickly. Hopefully this makes using our revision material even easier!
We have videos focussing on the below but are considering adding more new video guides to the site. If you have any ideas as to what you would like to see, why let us know? Add a comment to this post.
Our current video set:
A video example:
As it’s close to exam time for many of you we thought we might give a quick reminder about your OSCE stations. The following list is compiled with over 7 years of teaching experience along with a recent mock exam teaching exercise involving 30 medical students.
In the observation of 30 medical students only 1 was able to perform all these 5 correctly!
Make sure you carry out all 5 of these tasks carefully, and correctly, to gain maximum marks in your exam.
1) Students not introducing as themselves to patients using their full name
“My name is Joe, Im a 3rd year medical student”
Instead of
“My name is Joe Bloggs, Im a 3rd Year medical student”
2) Lack of awareness of infection control policy in the clinical area: Naked below the elbows, no watches in most areas!
Make sure you wash your hands before touching the patient to take history and again prior to the examination.
3) Not getting simple core patient data: age and occupation
Over 50% of the students in one sample of >30 missed this. There are no excuses for missing this!
4) Not exposing the patient correctly – ask the examiner first
The most common exposures are:
* CVS: Exposure, 45 degrees
* Resp: Exposure, 45 degrees
* GIT: Exposure (shirt off, normally nipples to knees, but for examination purposes it is incredibly rare to expose or examine external genitalia as part of the GI exam!)
* Neuro: Arms 45 degrees, Legs flat, CN sitting
* Hands: Expose elbows, use a pillow
* Hips Knees: Supine, flat
5) Not inspecting areas correctly
You should move first from the end of the bed prior to the examination, and then the core area examined (e.g. abdomen: look round both flanks for scars etc, chest look in axilla / closely for scars/ signs of thoracocentesis).
UMAP is the Universities Medical Assessment Partnership and is relevant to many medical students from the UK.
UMAP, one organisation currently working to standardise medical student exam question content across medical schools
It’s essentially the organisation which is writing/ collecting a bank of medical student exam questions for use in ‘high stakes’ examinations, such as medical finals.
UMAP’s description of their activities can be found on their website: On the site they describe themselves as follows:
UMAP’s aim is to improve quality in high stakes written assessments across UK medical schools. UMAP runs best practice item writing sessions where clinical and academic staff come together to learn about item writing techniques and to represent their subject area in the developing question bank.
UMAP QA process
Once written, questions move on to be quality assured at UMAP question review meetings which are convened at our partner schools. Staff members with experience in assessment and who are familiar with UMAP style and technique check each question and amend as necessary to ensure the highest accuracy and conformity to question writing principles. Questions are then ready for use and are listed as part of selection documentation available to our partner medical schools.
Schools are invited to select the items they wish to use and then confirm their selections to us. Schools later return results data in an electronic format which is then analysed and uploaded into the UMAP bank. A summary of this data is displayed within question selection documentation to enable schools to make informed, evidence based, item choices. [Accessed 4.03.09 from http://www.umap.org.uk/about/]
From their site they cover about 14 medical schools and they run an active recruitment of Specialist Registrars to write questions for their bank, most recently to our knowledge in Birmingham at a West Midlands General Internal Medicine training day.
UMAP currently publish on their site that as of October 2008 they have over 2500 questions for use in the these high stakes examinations. They acknowledge that they seem to be lacking in a few key areas, however they are currently working to address this.
What do you need to know about UMAP as a medical student? Well probably not that much. In fact all UMAP really are trying to do is generate sensible MCQ questions that are fair, and are well written. They have a reasonably complicated list of rules that a number of ME’s contributors have been talked through at a number of different times: overall though its not rocket science.
In principle, when UMAP look at the answers for any given question, they check that these same answers seem reasonable. They also like the same level of detail for both (for example the answers should all be of similar length).
What about the stem’s themselves: again UMAP make some sensible judgements including avoidance of medical jargon, avoiding using the same words in the questions and the answers etc. They should be readable and comprehensible.
So is there any technique involved? Well yes! Look carefully at results an investigations. Its clear that UMAPs strategy will be not to spoon feed the reader. For example if an important feature is tachycardia the question may read as follows
Ther pulse rate was 124 – Rather than mentioning the tachycardia directly, or showing a picture of an ECG
The same goes for investigation reults: e.g. K+ 3.0 mmol/l (NR 3.5-5.5 mmol/l) rather than ‘hypokalaemia’
All this means is that you have to look carefully at the investigation answers, and then draw conclusions. The rest is guesswork? Not really. Simple mathematics state that you should rule out the maximum number of wrong answers, and maximise your chance of success.
Medical Educator or its wuestion writers have not contributed any questions to the UMAP quesiton bank and have no formal or informal association with the organisation. We’d be interested to hear students comments and opinions about the work done by UMAP.
Loading ...AS a We set out with the aim of collecting and publishing our feedback, marks and progress. The site is aimed broadly at medical students, and it would be unrealistic to expect the site to meet with universal approval. We now have >600 registered trial users growing at an exponential rate.
Source: Medical Educator Feedback- October '08- February '09
We have tried to do the following:
Our feedback to date has been encouraging.
>85% of our subscription and free trial users would recommend us to a friend.
All (yes 100%) of our users have reported no difficulty in site navigation. We need to improve on our video speeds, and we’re in the process of securing web hosting for this above and beyond our current capacity.
We have had comments about the transparency of the site, along with its problems. However we hope that our commitments to quality and customer service continues to single us out as the first choice for medical students trying to pass medical examinations.
We hope to continue to provide quality questions, videos, audio guides, PDF one minute guides to keep our site at the cutting edge of medical student development.
Are other sites transparent, collating and publishing feedback? You tell us!