Question
What journal club experience do you have?
Answer
Stanford anesthesia housestaff participate in several different “journal clubs” during residency. The pediatric, obstetric, and regional anesthesia rotations have their own journal club for residents on that specialty to enhance their abilities in critical thinking and scientific reading. In addition, the FARM research tract residents have their own regular journal club.
The Stanford anesthesia program also has journal clubs for each class, CA1s (Monday afternoon during protected time), CA2s (Tuesdays), and CA3s (Wednesdays). Each resident leads one of these sessions during their training under the guidance of a faculty member. This journal club affords a real-world example of the application of the principles and practices of evidence-based medicine. The goal is to evaluate scientific or clinical aspects of anesthesia care.
Residents work with the assigned faculty mentor to help them address a self-determined clinical question (perhaps a difficult patient the resident took care of) through a literature search using various online search engines such as pubmed (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/) or the Cochrane Library. Online supplemental instruction (for example http://lane.stanford.edu/help/choose-search.html#clinical-all) is available via the Lane Medical Library and Knowledge Management Center (http://lane.stanford.edu/index.html) and the Stanford/Packard Center for Translational Medicine (http://med.stanford.edu/spctrm/).
The articles chosen from peer reviewed journals include supporting and/or contradictory evidence. The validity of these articles is assessed and discussed with the preceptor and then with their class of peers. The results are presented formally by the resident to the other residents via powerpoint. This peer to peer learning assists residents take better care of patients based on what is known on the topic. All these journall club small group learning activities enable residents to develop skills locating information, using IT resources, assimilating evidence from scientific studies and applying it to our patients’ health problems.