Category Archives: Education

You’ve Been Pimped! Origins And How To Survive It!

What exactly is pimping? If you have ever been a medical student or resident in any discipline, you probably already know. It’s ostensibly a form of Socratic teaching in which an attending physician poses a (more or less) poignant question to one or more learners. The learners are then queried (often in order of their status on the seniority “totem pole”) until someone finally gets the answer. But typically, it doesn’t stop there. Frequently, the questioning progresses to the point that only the attending knows the answer.

So how did this time honored tradition in medical education come about? The first reference in the literature attributes it to none other than William Harvey, who first described the circulatory system in detail. He was disappointed with his students’ apparent lack of interest in learning about his area of expertise. He was quoted as saying “they know nothing of Natural Philosophy, these pin-heads. Drunkards, sloths, their bellies filled with Mead and Ale. O that I might see them pimped!”

Other famous physicians participated in this as well. Robert Koch, the founder of modern bacteriology, actually recorded a series of “pümpfrage” or “pimp questions” that he used on rounds. And in 1916, a visitor at Johns Hopkins noted that he “rounded with Osler today. Riddles house officers with questions. Like a Gatling gun. Welch says students call it ‘pimping.’ Delightful.”

So it’s been around a long time. And yes, it has some problems. It promotes hierarchy, because the attending almost always starts questions at the bottom of the food chain. So the trainees come to know their standing in the eyes of the attending. And they also can appreciate where their fund of (useful?) knowledge compares to their “peers.” It demands quick thinking, and can certainly create stress. And a survey published last year showed that 50% of respondents were publicly embarrassed during their clinical rotations. What portion of this might have been due to pimping was not clear.

Does pimping work? Only a few small studies have been done. Most medical students have been involved with and embarrassed by it. But they also responded that they appreciated it as a way to learn. A 2011 study compared pimping (Socratic) methods to slide presentations in radiology education. Interestingly, 93% preferred pimping, stating that they felt their knowledge base improved more when they were actively questioned, regardless of whether they knew the answer.

So here are a few guidelines that will help make this technique a positive experience for all:

For the “pimpers”:

  • Make sure that the difficulty level of questions is reasonable. You are testing your learners’ knowledge, not spotlighting your own mental encyclopedia
  • Build the level of difficulty from questions that most can answer to one or two that no one knows, then switch to didactice teaching of the esoterica
  • Don’t let one learner dominate the answers; gently exclude them and solicit answers from others so they get a chance to participate
  • Provide positive reinforcement for correct answers, but don’t resort to negative reinforcement (insults) when they are wrong
  • Go Socratic when the answer is not known. Step back and review the basic concepts involved that helps your learners arrive at the correct answer.

For the “pimpees”:

  • Read, read, read! You are in this to learn, so study all the clinical material around you.
  • Talk to your seniors to find out your attending’s areas of interest. There’s a lot of stuff to learn, and this may help you focus your rounding preparation a bit. It still doesn’t absolve you from learning about all the other stuff, though.
  • Don’t be “that guy (or gal)” who tries to dominate and answer every question
  • If all else fails, and it’s one of those “percentage” questions, use my
    “85/15 rule.”
    If the issue you are being asked about seems pretty likely, answer “85%.” If it seems unlikely, go with “15%.” It’s usually close enough to the real answer to satisfy.

Bottom line: Pimping is a time-honored tradition in medicine, but should not be considered a rite of passage. There is a real difference in attitudes and learning if carried out properly. Even attendings have a thing or two to learn about this!

Reference: The art of pimping. JAMA. 262(1):89-90, 1989.

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You’ve Been Pimped!

You know what I’m talking about. It’s a mainstay of medical education for physicians. It starts in medical school, and generally never stops. And when you finish your residency,  you graduate from being pimped to being the pimper.

How did this all come to be? Is it good for education? Bad? Tune in tomorrow to learn more. In the meantime, enjoy this algorithm on how to get through a pimping session. Click to view full-size.

pimping

Source: Posted by Dr. Fizzy on The Almost Doctor’s Channel

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Best Of AAST #14: Trauma Patient Health Literacy

When is the last time this has happened to you? You are called to the ED for a trauma activation. The patient was involved in a motorcycle crash and is doing fine, but he has a large midline scar on his abdomen. You inquire as to what it is. He tells you that he had been involved in another motorcycle crash about five years ago and needed an operation. When questioned about what his injuries were and what was done, he has no idea.

This is an example of health (il)literacy at its best. An earlier study from the Presley trauma center in Memphis demonstrated that less than half of their trauma patients could correctly recall their injuries or their operations.

This is not really surprising. Have you ever taken a minute to look at the sheaf of paper given to hospital patients when they are discharged? They are usually computer-generated gobbledygook and are not easily understood by any human on this earth. It is hard enough to figure out the discharge medications and followup visits. And any diagnosis or surgical procedure information is never in patient-friendly language.

The Memphis group designed a simple discharge information form to provide to their patients:

Here are the factoids:

  • Patients admitted to the trauma service over a 6-month period were studied and surveyed during their first post-discharge clinic visit
  • A total of 153 surveys were distributed, asking about income, education, and patient satisfaction and their understanding of what happened to them; 146 were returned
  • Income levels were low, with about 60% of them less than $25K and 85% less than $50K
  • About 75% had a high school education or less
  • Implementation of the form increased injury recall some or all of patient injuries from 55% to 85%, and recall of operations from 43% to 76%
  • The number of patients who could recall any of their providers’ names increased from 11% to 31% (!)
  • Injury understanding, satisfaction with injury understanding, and the overall impact on hospitalization was significantly positive

The authors concluded that introducing this simple form dramatically improved their patients’ health literacy, and their patients were able to provide more details to providers they visited post-discharge.

Here are my comments: I think the bottom line here is to know your patients! Socioeconomic and education status vary dramatically by geographic location. This certainly has an impact on the understanding and recall of hospital events by our patients. It can help us optimize processes to provide meaningful and important information that they need to know in the future.

The form used in this study was very simple, consisting of a series of blanks to be filled in by a healthcare provider. But who was this provider? All medical professionals tend to use the lingo that we learned in training. But our patients have zero understanding of them. Consider the lowly Foley catheter. Tell a patient you are going to insert one, and they will say “uh-huh.” But tell them that you are preparing to stick a big rubber tube in their penis, and the response will be much more vocal. Make sure the language is simple and lingo-free.

The recall of provider names improved only modestly. This may be due to the typical “interchangeable head” model where the various healthcare professionals change on a frequent bases. Additionally, patients are seen by a horde of nurses, physicians, APPs, residents, techs, and others during their stay so it’s easy to forget a name.

Overall, the results were very promising. This is a significant advance in patient health education and literacy. I think the next step is to provide a library of information sheets based on the common injury diagnoses and operations that occur at the trauma center. This, coupled with a more intelligible set of discharge papers in general will be of great help to our patients.

Here are my questions for the presenter and authors:

  • Why so few surveys? Your center is very busy, and the study data only involved about 25 patients per month. How did you select them, and might information obtained from all the other patients have changed your results?
  • Did you independently review the discharge forms to ensure understandable language? The intelligibility could vary significantly based on the provider filling it out.
  • How did your care model affect the patient recall of their providers? Do your residents or attending surgeons rotate on a frequent basis? What other factors might have influenced this?
  • What next? How has this information changed how you educate your patients now? What additional changes might you make in the future? How will you roll it out to more than just 25 patients per month?

This is excellent work! I’m looking forward to your live presentation later this week.

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Coming Soon! New Site For Trauma PI!

One of the most common requests I get is to provide more detailed content on Trauma Performance Improvement! To that end I am putting together a collection of print and video content on a new website that will address the things you really want to hear about but can’t find anywhere else.

Here’s a sample listing of some of the topics that will be covered:

  • Writing a good PI plan
  • Loop closure – basic to advanced
  • Involving your TMD
  • PRQ preparation
  • Creating workable practice guidelines
  • Crafting a Massive Transfusion Protocol that works for you
  • How to calculate your optimal number of trauma registrars
  • Preparing for your site survey
  • How to read your TQIP report
  • What is OPPE and how do I do it?
  • Integrating PI with your registry
  • How to interpret the Orange Book

If you want to be one of the first to get access to this content, please fill out the form by clicking here. Your name will be placed on my early bird e-mail list. I’ll provide regular updates on the opening date, and solicit your ideas on specific content you would like to see.

Subscribe to the mailing list now!

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You’ve Been Pimped! Origins And How To Survive It!

What exactly is pimping? If you have ever been a medical student or resident in any discipline, you probably already know. It’s ostensibly a form of Socratic teaching in which an attending physician poses a (more or less) poignant question to one or more learners. The learners are then queried (often in order of their status on the seniority “totem pole”) until someone finally gets the answer. But typically, it doesn’t stop there. Frequently, the questioning progresses to the point that only the attending knows the answer.

So how did this time honored tradition in medical education come about? The first reference in the literature attributes it to none other than William Harvey, who first described the circulatory system in detail. He was disappointed with his students’ apparent lack of interest in learning about his area of expertise. He was quoted as saying “they know nothing of Natural Philosophy, these pin-heads. Drunkards, sloths, their bellies filled with Mead and Ale. O that I might see them pimped!”

Other famous physicians participated in this as well. Robert Koch, the founder of modern bacteriology, actually recorded a series of “pümpfrage” or “pimp questions” that he used on rounds. And in 1916, a visitor at Johns Hopkins noted that he “rounded with Osler today. Riddles house officers with questions. Like a Gatling gun. Welch says students call it ‘pimping.’ Delightful.”

So it’s been around a long time. And yes, it has some problems. It promotes hierarchy, because the attending almost always starts questions at the bottom of the food chain. So the trainees come to know their standing in the eyes of the attending. And they also can appreciate where their fund of (useful?) knowledge compares to their “peers.” It demands quick thinking, and can certainly create stress. And a survey published last year showed that 50% of respondents were publicly embarrassed during their clinical rotations. What portion of this might have been due to pimping was not clear.

Does pimping work? Only a few small studies have been done. Most medical students have been involved with and embarrassed by it. But they also responded that they appreciated it as a way to learn. A 2011 study compared pimping (Socratic) methods to slide presentations in radiology education. Interestingly, 93% preferred pimping, stating that they felt their knowledge base improved more when they were actively questioned, regardless of whether they knew the answer.

So here are a few guidelines that will help make this technique a positive experience for all:

For the “pimpers”:

  • Make sure that the difficulty level of questions is reasonable. You are testing your learners’ knowledge, not spotlighting your own mental encyclopedia
  • Build the level of difficulty from questions that most can answer to one or two that no one knows, then switch to didactice teaching of the esoterica
  • Don’t let one learner dominate the answers; gently exclude them and solicit answers from others so they get a chance to participate
  • Provide positive reinforcement for correct answers, but don’t resort to negative reinforcement (insults) when they are wrong
  • Go Socratic when the answer is not known. Step back and review the basic concepts involved that helps your learners arrive at the correct answer.

For the “pimpees”:

  • Read, read, read! You are in this to learn, so study all the clinical material around you.
  • Talk to your seniors to find out your attending’s areas of interest. There’s a lot of stuff to learn, and this may help you focus your rounding preparation a bit. It still doesn’t absolve you from learning about all the other stuff, though.
  • Don’t be “that guy (or gal)” who tries to dominate and answer every question
  • If all else fails, and it’s one of those “percentage” questions, use my
    “85/15 rule.”
    If the issue you are being asked about seems pretty likely, answer “85%.” If it seems unlikely, go with “15%.” It’s usually close enough to the real answer to satisfy.

Bottom line: Pimping is a time-honored tradition in medicine, but should not be considered a rite of passage. There is a real difference in attitudes and learning if carried out properly. Even attendings have a thing or two to learn about this!

Reference: The art of pimping. JAMA. 262(1):89-90, 1989.

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