e-logbook wins $35K grant
The School of Rural Health Latrobe Valley & West Gippsland has won an MBBS development grant $35,000 to continue development of its e-logbook.
Developed in-house by Bill Haigh, the e-logbook allows Year 4C students to record clinical learning experiences across all disciplines. Students can then review their accumulating clinical portfolio to identify and reflect on strengths and areas for improvement, and to seek feedback to direct their learning efforts. Clinical supervisors can monitor their students’ activities and can compare their recorded experiences to that of the cohort and to other datasets. The ease of reporting enables supervisors to see and address any problems early in a placement.
The current pilot makes use of ICPC-2 codes (International Classification of Primary Care) in general practice and children’s health placements. ICPC-2 codes enable clinical encounters to be placed within an internationally standardised framework. Clinical learning in women’s health and medicine of the mind disciplines is task-based, and does not yet link to a standardised database to allow an appreciation of how learning opportunities in the community and hospital based settings are complementary and extend the student’s knowledge and skill base
The new project will develop an equivalent logbook for the medicine of the mind discipline based on the latest edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders and mapped to the ICPC-2 codes. This will make it possible to describe clinical learning experiences across distributed sites and link these to other disciplines. The project will also automate the logbook’s reporting function and enhance its presentation on the small screens of hand held devices.
The project team hopes the final resource can be marketed outside Monash.
The team includes the Year 4C coordinator; clinical dean; discipline leads for general practice, children’s health and medicine of the mind; the blended learning and simulation coordinator at the Latrobe Valley and West Gippsland; the overall medicine of the mind discipline lead and Year 4C assessment committee coordinator.