Critical care recognition, management and communication skills during an emergency medicine clerkship

Background: Medical students need to learn how to recognize and manage critically ill patients; to communicate in critical situations with patients, families, and the healthcare team; and finally, to integrate technical knowledge with communication skills in caring for these patients. Meeting their needs will help prepare them to demonstrate, as physicians, the ability to synthesize information while simultaneously caring for patients, that the American Medical Association recently characterized as vital.Aims: Responding to these needs, we developed and implemented a curriculum to enable students in a required emergency medicine clerkship to recognize, manage, and simultaneously communicate with critically ill patients.Methods: The curriculum consisted of lectures and exercises on caring for the critically ill including: an introduction to the systematic approach; an interactive lecture on comprehensive communication; observation and discussion of real patients in the emergency department; participation i...