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Conceptualising and Teaching Biomedical Uncertainty to Medical Students: an Exploratory Qualitative Study
Eva Lukšaitė1, Rosemary A Fricker1, Robert K McKinley1
1School of Medicine, David Weatherall Building, Keele University, Keele, ST5 5BG Staffordshire UK.
Biomedical uncertainty is common in medicine but often excluded from teaching due to time and assessment constraints. Educators use a "medic filter" to prioritize core knowledge, inadvertently omitting crucial uncertainty.
Area of Science:
- Medical Education
- Biomedical Sciences
- Epistemology in Medicine
Background:
- Certainty and uncertainty in medicine are widely debated topics.
- Understanding how academic medical educators conceptualize and teach biomedical uncertainty is crucial.
Purpose of the Study:
- To explore the conceptualization of biomedical uncertainty among academic medical educators.
- To investigate how biomedical uncertainty is taught within a UK medical school.
Main Methods:
- Exploratory qualitative study using ethnographic principles.
- Data collected through 10 teaching session observations and 7 semi-structured interviews with medical educators.
- Thematic analysis was employed to analyze the collected data.
Main Results:
- Biomedical uncertainty is ubiquitous across disciplines, though conceptualizations vary.
- Teaching of uncertainty is constrained by time limitations and assessment strategies.
- Educators utilize a 'medic filter' to distinguish core from additional knowledge, with uncertainty often relegated to additional knowledge.
Conclusions:
- Despite the acknowledged ubiquity of biomedical uncertainty, its integration into medical education is limited.
- The concept of situated knowledge offers a framework for discussing scientific knowledge in medical education.
- Rethinking pedagogical approaches is needed to better incorporate biomedical uncertainty.
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