Today@Dal

Posted Sunday by the Chronicle Herald:

When first-year medical students started their program at Dalhousie University last month, they got a dose of training unavailable to previous generations of doctors-to-be.

They received early instruction on a crucial component of a doctor’s modus operandi — critical thinking.

Call it Decision Making 101.

Dalhousie’s freshman class of med students, like older medical trainees, “need to be told how they think,” Dr. Pat Croskerry said.

A patient-safety expert, Croskerry is an emergency medicine physician and the director of the critical thinking program at the university’s medical school. The program was established last year.

The thinking process delivered by our brains — activity that produces judgment, analysis, intuition — can also turn out biases, Croskerry said recently. That could lead to such counterproductive or harmful diagnostic side-effects as tunnel vision and medical errors.

Although doctors who’ve been working longer than those beginning their medical careers are likely to be correct more often than not, knowledgeable physicians are not infallible.

“You see classic mistakes being made by experienced people” in the medical profession and many other fields, Croskerry said.

At Dalhousie, critical thinking and decision making are now built into the med school’s curriculum, he said. Decision making is even discussed during the first-year students’ orientation week.

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