While a little bit of "pimping" goes on at the Milton Cato Memorial Hospital, it is hardly malicious in nature, and most of the time the questions are things we should know, rather than the arcane details asked on exams.

Peter Scoles, MD, the National Board of Medical Examiners' senior vice president for assessment programs, said they discovered a software problem during a quality control check of the U.S. Medical Licensing Examination Step 2 Clinical Skills exam results. This is the first year that graduating medical school students are required to take the test, which organized medicine initially met with resistance but has since accepted.

Dr. Scoles said that he was personally calling those who the problem affected. The error is "something that the organization deeply regrets, but it [uncovering the error] shows the kind of process that we're committed to, to keep checking and rechecking," he said.

Of the 38 students affected, 14 were from U.S. medical schools and 24 were from international programs. Dr. Scoles said the students took the news well.

The computer error occurred when student scores for note taking were assigned to the wrong individuals.

Source: Amednews.com

But I won't have to worry about that if I don't graduate, so back to studying… Immuno

A postcall resident crashes while driving home. Is the hospital liable?

Heather Brewster was hit by a first-year internal medical resident who was driving home after 36 hours on call. Brewster, who was 23 at the time, July 14, 1997, sustained a head injury that has left her permanently disabled and has since been deemed incompetent by the courts.

Brewster's family is suing the resident and teaching hospital, Rush University Medical Center in Chicago, on her behalf. The family says Rush should be held liable because it enforced a work schedule that left residents sleep-deprived. They have asked an appeals court to overturn a lower court ruling excluding Rush from the lawsuit on the grounds that it could not be held responsible for an employee's after-work conduct.

At stake, legal experts say, is the broader issue of resident work hours. If Rush is held responsible for the car crash, then teaching hospitals nationwide could be vulnerable to similar suits, even though residents are no longer allowed to work 36-hour stints.

Continue at: AMA News

Hat Tip: Kevin, MD

THE running joke that playfully follows Dr. James Clarence Rosser Jr. when he prepares to operate at Beth Israel Medical Center in New York is that this ebullient man possesses hands too large to perform traditional surgery.

Instead, Dr. Rosser prefers laparoscopic surgery, a technique that relies on an ultra-small video camera to help him manipulate long, slender instruments inserted into patients through small incisions. It is, he said recently, as his hulking 6-foot-4 frame loomed over a surgical simulator using instruments he designed, an elegantly efficient approach to repairing the human body.

The complex manual dexterity required to be a stellar video gamer and minimally invasive surgeon are strikingly similar, said Dr. Rosser, chief of minimally invasive surgery and director of the hospital's Advanced Medical Technology Institute. More important, he is using video games to help develop and train a new generation of surgeons who may have unwittingly acquired an aptitude for laparoscopic surgery while wiling away thousands of hours playing Mortal Kombat, BloodRayne and the like.

Dr. Rosser, 50, practices what he preaches. He keeps an Xbox, along with PlayStation 2 and GameCube consoles, just a few strides from the operating room so he can warm up with a favorite, Super Monkey Ball, just before surgery.

Last year Dr. Rosser was a co-author of a study that concluded that surgeons who played video games for at least three hours a week were 27 percent faster and made 37 percent fewer mistakes than surgeons who did not play video games.

Read more at the NY Times.

Vancouver - A divorced Lower Mainland doctor has been ordered to pay $22,000 a year in child support to his daughter while she attends medical school, despite his argument that she's an adult. The order comes from the B.C. Court of Appeal, which upheld a lower court decision. Dr. William Peter Neufeld had argued that the original judge failed to find that his daughter could finance her education through student loans. But his ex-wife maintained that their daughter, who is now 23, should continue to get child support as she follows in her father's footsteps. The Court of Appeal agreed, and ordered Neufeld to pay a total of $88,000 to his daughter for her four years at medical school. The lawyer representing Neufeld's ex-wife says the case is precedent setting.
Karen McNeilly says it will be referenced in similar cases in the future - cases where one parent is a high-earning professional, whose child is
pursuing a graduate degree.

From: CBC News