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Throw that epidemiologist out of the emergency room! Using the television series ER as a vehicle for teaching
1Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics, University of Western Ontario, London, Canada. ostbye@uwo.ca
Background:
Epidemiology and biostatistics graduate students have diverse backgrounds, but many have little prior training in medicine or biology. This lack of content knowledge in future health researchers has recently been raised as a concern.
Methods:
As part of a graduate course on the epidemiology of major diseases, the television series ER was used as a vehicle for learning more about diseases in general, and to become familiar with medical terminology and the ICD-10 by practicing coding on the patients seen. Furthermore, we wanted to provide human faces to the type of disease data students usually work with.
Results:
In this article, the authors discuss how the ER sessions were organized and the problems that were encountered. The course evaluation concluded that the students found the exercise to be an interesting break from regular teaching.