Choosing Wisely Canada – Canadian Geriatrics Society Recommendations for family medicine residents.
About Me
I have a strong interest in leadership and I am a PGY3 Family Medicine resident in the first cohort of Integrated 3 Year Residency program. I have a keen interest in geriatrics and will be pursuing the Care of the Elderly program next year. Throughout medical school, I have always had academic interests in the principles of resource stewardship through my research with Choosing Wisely Canada. This campaign aims to help health care providers and patients engage in conversations about unnecessary tests, treatments, and procedures. I am currently completing a Masters of System Leadership and Innovation and currently in the #EdTechHPE20 Class and I look forward to elaborating on my educational dilemma.
Educational Dilemma
THE BACKGROUND OF THE DILEMMA:
My educational dilemma is aimed at finding an educational tool that can help teach family medicine residents about the Choosing Wisely Canada Geriatric Recommendations.
See the list here: https://choosingwiselycanada.org/geriatrics/
As a future Care of the Elderly resident physician who has a passion for education and resource stewardship, this educational dilemma is one that needs to tackled. Can you believe that 30% of the tests, treatments, and procedures in our health care system are considered unnecessary? Elderly patients are disproportionately impacted by these unnecessary interventions that can cause false positives and patient anxiety. Thus, these five recommendations are made to teach physicians how to “Choose Wisely” when it comes to these tests treatment and procedures.
THE TOOL:
I would like to make an interactive module that teaches the five recommendations for Choosing Wisely. The tool will be a video-based webinar through Powtoon. I will elaborate on the evidence and give some clinical pearls around each recommendation to make them relevant and memorable for my students. I will also have a blog on this website so feel free to check it out and engage!
THE AUDIENCE
Family medicine residents who may not have as much comfort or experience in geriatrics. These are my future students who I hope to improve their clinical skills, especially around tests, treatments, and procedures for older adults.
Follow My Choosing Wisely Canada Geriatrics Blog
My Final Assignment
It was a pleasure working on this final assignment to help create an online module for family medicine residents to become better clinicians when caring for older adults. Below you will find the link to my website which includes the quizzes and modules for Choosing Wisely Canada. Enjoy! https://starsgeriatrics.wordpress.com
Final Elevator Pitch
After getting lots of great feedback from my peers and instructors, I present to you my Final Elevator Pitch. It is titled Teaching the Choosing Wisely Canada Geriatrics Recommendations. It was fascinating learning about PowToon and how to integrate the audio and visuals together. I learned a lot of important lessons that I hope to…
Revised Educational Dilemma
After receiving feedback from my peers, I have added some finer details to my educational dilemma. Some of the suggestions included providing more evidence to back up my statement that this tool was necessary for family medicine residents. I refined the exact module that I hope to utilize to convey the message. There was some confusion regarding when…
For more Information…
- Feel free to contact me if you have any questions at elliot.lass@mail.utoronto.ca or send me a private message on Slack.
- I am always happy to chat before or after class about any of these concepts you have questions about.
- As a student myself, I am always learning and I would greatly appreciate your feedback!
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Canadian Geriatrics Society Choosing Wisely Canada Recommendations 
Hi Elliot,
This sounds like a project that will meet an educational need related to geriatics. Is there any literature, or survey results of residents, that supports the idea that there is a knowledge gap for family medicine residents related to geriatrics-related learning outcomes? Also, I wonder if we could brainstorm together about how to get buy-in from residents to view these websites and also understand that they are important (and not just another task to complete)-any thoughts?
Keep up the great work!
Katie
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Hi Katie,
Thanks so much for the feedback. Speaking from personal experience as a family medicine resident, at times I felt that our geriatrics exposure was more limited than it could have been, given the aging population.
Of course there is some data that backs up my personal observation. From STFM (Society of Teachers of Family Medicine) there was a recent Canadian study from 2019 looking at family medicine resident preparedness for geriatric care. They found some gaps such as wanting to see more family medicine role models in geriatric training. The authors felt that there should be a focus on continuing professional development to fill this gap. This is why I feel it is so important that I as a future family doctor has the qualities to teach geriatrics with an interactive approach through this technology.
Check out their survey here: https://journals.stfm.org/primer/2019/ingram-2018-0050/
I look forward to collaborating and finding ways for residents to feel like certain educational experiences are important and not just another box to check off.
Best,
Elliot
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Hi Elliot!
How do you forsee your learners interacting with the videos? Will the videos provide context/evidence/info only, or do you also intend on using videos to present case studies, and have learners make decisions based on cases/examples? As a-much-too-detailed suggestion: if learners are asked to make a decision based on real-world examples, you could embed (and re-enforce) the evidence and clinical pearl in the feedback. These interactions can be used whether or not you track learners and their progress. As you flush out your solution you will want also want to consider how will it be shared? Is it more an FYI resource, or will you want/need to evaluate this intervention?
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Hi Kataryna! You make some great points about the tool that I will be using to convey my message. I still need to experiment with different options including Powtoon and Videoscribe. I would love to chat with you more about my options for tech innovations and see what you recommend. I am hoping to do a video module and maybe integrate some multiple choice questions that will include some case based clinical scenarios for each of the five recommendations. I really like the way that PGCORED did their videos, but I am not sure about feasibility, cost, and ease of use for me, because I have never done anything like this before. This video will be for family medicine residents before they start their geriatrics rotation to help equip them with the tools to choose more wisely. Thanks for the all tips!
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