Related Experiment Video
Updated: Sep 24, 2025

Experimental Research Examining How People Can Cope with Uncertainty Through Soft Haptic Sensations
Published on: September 16, 2015
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.
Introduction:
Certainty/uncertainty in medicine is a topic of popular debate. This study aims to understand how biomedical uncertainty is conceptualised by academic medical educators and how it is taught in a medical school in the UK.
Methods:
This is an exploratory qualitative study grounded in ethnographic principles. This study is based on 10 observations of teaching sessions and seven semi-structured qualitative interviews with medical educators from various biomedical disciplines in a UK medical school. The data set was analysed via a thematic analysis.
Results:
Four main themes were identified after analysis: (1) ubiquity of biomedical uncertainty, (2) constraints to teaching biomedical uncertainty, (3) the 'medic filter' and (4) fluid distinction: core versus additional knowledge. While medical educators had differing understandings of how biomedical uncertainty is articulated in their disciplines, its presence was ubiquitous. This ubiquity did not translate into teaching due to time constraints and assessment strategies. The 'medic filter' emerged as a strategy that educators employed to decide what to include in their teaching. They made distinctions between core and additional knowledge which were defined in varied ways across disciplines. Additional knowledge often encapsulated biomedical uncertainty.
Discussion:
Even though the perspective that knowledge is socially constructed is not novel in medical education, it is neither universally valued nor universally applied. Moving beyond situativity theories and into broader debates in social sciences provides new opportunities to discuss the nature of scientific knowledge in medical education. We invite a move away from situated learning to situated knowledge.
More Related Videos
13:44Project-Based Learning Guidelines for Health Sciences Students: An Analysis with Data Mining and Qualitative Techniques
Published on: December 9, 2022
05:04Author Spotlight: Evaluating Clinicians' Adoption of Ultrasound-Guided Vascular Cannulation Through Simulation Training
Published on: August 9, 2024
Related Concept Videos
Uncertainty: Overview
Propagation of Uncertainty from Random Error
Types of Biopharmaceutical Studies: Controlled and Non-Controlled Approaches
Non-controlled studies, commonly employed for initial exploration, lack a control group, rendering them susceptible to biases and external influences. In contrast,...
Uncertainty in Measurement: Accuracy and Precision
Uncertainty: Confidence Intervals
Propagation of Uncertainty from Systematic Error