What are the McGill DOM Grants for Scholarship in Medical Education?

This DOM Grant was used to fund a Software engineer to prepare the DPapp for large-scale online practice and debriefing with the following goals:

• Simplify the DPApp graphic user interface and case builder to make it easier for learners to use the online software on smartphones and faster for clinical educators to create new cases.
• Create a cloud-based system to house the cases and store learners’ performance data
• Create a procedure for downloading learners’ performance data into an excel spreadsheet that can be read by online tutors in order to debrief learners and used by educational researchers to explore relationships between learners’ performances and emotions.
• Test the new system with a small number of ERRAD course volunteers.

This project will lead to a scalable blended or totally online simulation that could contribute to:

• The education of hundreds to thousands of learners nationally and globally
• Research on how learners’ emotions impact clinical reasoning
• The creation of a Serious Game

Progress to Date: The first 3 goals of this project have been completed. We aim to accomplish the 4^th goal after the 2023 ERRAD course that has been scheduled for April 26 and 27, 2023.

Our study explores internal medicine residents’ perceptions of service and education and how these differ at different stages of their training. We are conducting semi-structured interviews with internal medicine residents to better understand residents’ perception of service, and will use this information to improve the residency experience for our learners.

Following medical school, residents spend three years in an internal medicine residency program and then, 2-3 additional years in a subspecialty residency program. During this period, residents learn while working or providing ‘service’ as a physician, under the supervision of faculty physicians. There is a growing perception that service (work) activities may compromise resident education despite general agreement that work experience is central to residents’ learning and professional growth. The perception of what residents consider ‘education’ and what is considered ‘service’ varies, and little is known about what influences these perceptions.

Thanks to the educational grant received, we will be able to validate the efficacy and appreciation of MDF among Canadian dermatology residents' using a randomized education trial and qualitative survey to access their appreciation of the website and its features. We estimate the validation project to be completed by the end of summer 2023 and the website to launch concurrently during the summer 2023. We thank the donors for their generous support of educational initiatives to the McGill community and in particular, to the department of medicine.

There are over 3,000 different skin disorders ranging from benign lesions (eg. seborrheic keratoses) or inflammatory dermatoses (eg. atopic dermatitis, psoriasis) to malignancies (eg. melanoma). Every Canadian will be afflicted by a skin disease at some point of their life. For example, it is estimated that skin cancer will affect at least 1 Canadian out of 4. As the population ages, the burden of chronic diseases such as skin cancer and inflammatory dermatoses are expected to increase even further. Unfortunately, there are fewer than 3 dermatologists per 100,000 people in Quebec. Dermatology has the worst wait lists of all specialties with >80,000 patients awaiting to be seen by a dermatologist. Hence, there is an urgent need to educate and empower the primary care providers (eg. family physicians, nurse practitioners, pharmacists) as well as future generations of dermatologists to manage skin diseases today and in the future. To respond to this unmet need, we created Montreal Derm FilEZ (MDF). MDF provides a no-cost interactive comprehensive dermatology learning tool containing hundreds of learning modules on each dermatology topic (from skin care to specific diseases to surgical techniques) and includes over 6,000 open-ended style questions to instill competency managing all known skin diseases for medical professionals. Furthermore, some sections are tailored to prepare dermatology residents across the country to pass their royal college of dermatology examination.