MEDEV

School of Medical Sciences Education Development

Introduction

The background behind the establishment of the Jerwood Medical Education Resource Centre at the Royal College of Physicians.

In most medical libraries there is a limited range of specliased books, reports and journals focusing on teaching and training skills. In the medical sections of bookshops, these items are not stocked in any great quantity, and doctors are unlikely to find them reviewed by the major medical journals.

However, a knowledge base in medical education does exist and is ready to be exploited. This is at a time when education issues are at the forfront in providing quality and effective health services. The need to bring this knowledge base together and to keep doctors up-to-date with the latest information in medical education was one of the reasons in establishing the Jerwood Medical Education Resource Centre at the Royal College of Physicians, London.

Framing the collection

Supporting the education work and activities of College Members and Fellows is an important consideration for the resource centre.  Books and reports on educational supervision, assessment of competence and clinical teaching and training form a substantial part of the collection. Nearly all physicians working in the NHS have a teaching or training role, and the intention is to keep them information of the necesary skills, exisitng practices and best evidence in this area.

A look through the 2002 issues of the journal Medical Education shows a diverse range of topics covered. Issues of professionalism, artistic endeavours, stress and pastoral care have all been explored. It is this diversity in what the medical education comunity consider as their knowedge base, which has also helped to shape the resource centre collection. Education is considered to be a social science, and it can be argued that medical education in a broader sense is concerned with the social sciences as applied to medical practice. Books and reports on socilology, politics, psychology and economics with a medical or health care slant are a feature of the resource centre. Knowledge of the requisite skills and methods to teach are impotrant, but equally so are the fundamental barriers that prevent learning and development taking place amongst students and doctors. These barriers include sexism, bullying, racism and so on. Knowledge is a pre-requisite to debate, leading, sometimes, to change.

These issues are, of course, not soley confined to medicine but affect other professional practices. Subsequently books and reports dealing with these isues in other professions have also been acquired to allow doctors to compare and contrast. A good example is the work carried out in the aviation industry on system approaches in preventing accidents and error.

Searching and retrieving

For a long time medical educationalists have relied on the excellant TIMELIT database(1) for identifying publicactions in their field. To complement this, the Resource Centre catalogue has also been made available over the Internet(2). At the moment the technical infrastructure of the catalogue is under development but searches can still be carried out. The catalogue is a holdings database - the references retrieved from a search relate to an item held in the Resource Centre. The catalogue does not claim to be comprehensive in covering the entire medical education knowledge base, but it does contain references to all articles published in major UK journal titles (including Medical Education, Medical Teacher, Education in Primary care) as well as overseas ones (such as Academic Medicine, Teaching and Learning in Medicine and Advances in Health Sciences Education). For journals, coverage goes back to the last three - or four years (when the idea of the Resource Centre was conceived). For books and reports, most items in the Resource Centre tend to be no more than fifteen years old and this is reflected in the catalogue.

Searches can be carried out by author, name, title word(s) or subject. Each reference to an article or book is allocated a number of subject headings. These headings are derived from the British Education Index (BEI), and this should enhance the ability to search effectively for literature from an educational, rather than a medical, perspective. For those used to searching Medline, the BEI terms may be unfamiliar. A useful tip is to enter a suitable word in the title field, open up a catalogue record that nearly matches your requirements, examine what subject headings have been used, and use these headings to carry out a more refined ssearch. Alternatively, a (draft) listing of terms indicating broader, narrower and related subject terms used in the catalogue is available upon request.