If you can make it, you can share it - Perspectives on the first DIY-fair at the European congress of medical physics (ECMP, DUBLIN 2022)

The medical physics and engineering community is known for being active in conjuring do-it-yourself (DIY) -solutions to support their clinical and research work. To facilitate the exchange of solutions and ideas, a DIY-fair was held for the first time at the European Congress of Medical Physics (ECMP) in August 2022 in Dublin, Ireland. Altogether 32 contributions were presented, consisting of software, scripts, 3D-printed customized solutions, devices, gadgets and phantoms. All contributions were published in video format on a dedicated YouTube channel, and most were also presented in person at the conference. The fair demonstrated that there is an unmet need for sharing and distributing information on self-created solutions in the medical physics community. The authors propose the creation of a dedicated platform for sharing such content within our community, as well as a continuity of DIY-fairs at future ECMP meetings.

The Relational Nature of Gender, the Pervasiveness of Heteronormative Sexual Scripts, and the Impact on Sexual Pleasure

This study examined how gender shapes sexual interactions and pleasure outcomes. We highlight varying expectations people have in regard to sex by combining questions about orgasm frequency and sexual pleasure. Our analysis was driven from a sample of 907 survey responses from cis women, cis men, trans women, trans men, non-binary, and intersex millennial respondents, 324 of which had gender-diverse sexual histories. The findings built upon previous literature about the orgasm gap by including those with underrepresented gender identities and expanding our conceptualization of gender's role in the gap beyond gender identity. Qualitative results indicated that individuals change their behavior based on their partner's gender and follow strong gendered scripts. Participants also relied upon heteronormative scripts and cis normative roles to set their interactions for the sexual encounter. Our findings support previous research on how gender identity impacts pleasure outcomes and has implications for how we might make gender progress in the arena of sexuality.

Development of a script concordance test to assess clinical reasoning in a pharmacy curriculum

INTRODUCTION

Clinical reasoning is a vital skill for student pharmacists in the provision of patient-centered care, but these skills are often difficult to assess in the didactic curriculum. A script concordance test (SCT) is an innovative assessment method that can be used to assess clinical reasoning skills. The objective of this study was to develop and refine an SCT to assess clinical reasoning skills of third year student pharmacists (P3s).

METHODS

An SCT was written and administered to P3s. Pharmacy practice faculty members served as the expert group. The SCT was scored and Rasch analysis was performed.

RESULTS

The SCT included 20 case vignettes and 60 questions. Test reliability was 0.34 with mean square values for all items between 0.7 and 1.3. Forty-two questions had a difficulty score between 0 and - 1 logits, indicating there were multiple questions with similar difficulty levels. Two case vignettes and 43.3% of questions (n = 26) were revised to enhance clarity and decrease ambiguity.

CONCLUSIONS

The SCT is a tool to assess clinical reasoning in the didactic curriculum. Faculty can create the SCT and use statistical methods such as Rasch analysis to assess validity and reliability of the SCT.

"It Strengthened My Core Relationships, and Filtered Out the Rest:" Intimacy Communication During COVID-19

Informed by scripting theories and Relational Dialectics Theory, this qualitative study used interviews, focus groups, and friendship pods conducted during the summer of 2020 in the COVID-19 pandemic to explore how 29 cisgender women and gender minorities made sense of, communicated about, and maintained their intimate relationships during COVID-19. Findings reveal a discourse of scripted intimacy reflecting normative relational patterns such as the heterosexual life script and the discourse of co-created intimacy, both of which legitimized and challenged the existing relational scripts by generating new ideas of what intimacy could look like in a relationship. Sub-themes included tensions of stability v. growth, comfort v. discomfort, and physical risk v. relational risk. Implications and avenues for future research are discussed.

The status of semantic memory in medial temporal lobe amnesia varies with demands on scene construction

Semantic memory is typically preserved in medial temporal lobe (MTL) amnesia. However, there are instances of impairment, such as in the recall of semantic narratives. As some forms of semantic knowledge play out in a spatial context, one possible explanation is that semantic memory impairments, when observed, relate to demands on scene construction - the ability to bind and maintain spatial information in a coherent representation. To investigate whether semantic memory impairments in MTL amnesia can be understood with reference to a deficit in scene construction, the current study examined knowledge of scripts that vary in the extent to which they play out in a scene context in nine patients with MTL amnesia and eighteen healthy control subjects. Scripts are routine activities characterized by an ordered set of actions, including some that are essential for completing the activity. Comparing performance on scene-based scripts (e.g., buying groceries at the grocery store) and object-based scripts (e.g., addressing a letter), we found that patients generated the same number of total action steps as controls for both types of script, but patients were selectively impaired at generating essential actions steps for scene-based scripts. Furthermore, patients made more sequencing and idiosyncratic errors than controls in the scene-based, but not in the object-based, scripts. These findings demonstrate that the hippocampus plays a critical role in the retrieval of semantic knowledge about everyday activities when such retrieval entails scene construction.

Learning communication from erroneous video-based examples: A double-blind randomised controlled trial

OBJECTIVE

Appropriate training strategies are required to equip undergraduate healthcare students to benefit from communication training with simulated patients. This study examines the learning effects of different formats of video-based worked examples on initial communication skills.

METHODS

First-year nursing students (N=36) were randomly assigned to one of two experimental groups (correct v. erroneous examples) or to the control group (no examples). All the groups were provided an identical introduction to learning materials on breaking bad news; the experimental groups also received a set of video-based worked examples. Each example was accompanied by a self-explanation prompt (considering the example's correctness) and elaborated feedback (the true explanation).

RESULTS

Participants presented with erroneous examples broke bad news to a simulated patient significantly more appropriately than students in the control group. Additionally, they tended to outperform participants who had correct examples, while participants presented with correct examples tended to outperform the control group.

CONCLUSION

The worked example effect was successfully adapted for learning in the provider-patient communication domain.

PRACTICE IMPLICATIONS

Implementing video-based worked examples with self-explanation prompts and feedback can be an effective strategy to prepare students for their training with simulated patients, especially when examples are erroneous.

Improving functional magnetic resonance imaging reproducibility

BACKGROUND

The ability to replicate an entire experiment is crucial to the scientific method. With the development of more and more complex paradigms, and the variety of analysis techniques available, fMRI studies are becoming harder to reproduce.

RESULTS

In this article, we aim to provide practical advice to fMRI researchers not versed in computing, in order to make studies more reproducible. All of these steps require researchers to move towards a more open science, in which all aspects of the experimental method are documented and shared.

CONCLUSION

Only by sharing experiments, data, metadata, derived data and analysis workflows will neuroimaging establish itself as a true data science.

Witness recall across repeated interviews in a case of repeated abuse

In this illustrative case study we examine the three forensic interviews of a girl who experienced repeated sexual abuse from ages 7 to 11. She disclosed the abuse after watching a serialized television show that contained a storyline similar to her own experience. This triggered an investigation that ended in successful prosecution of the offender. Because this case involved abuse that was repeated on a weekly basis for 4 years we thus investigated the degree to which the child's narrative reflected specific episodes or generic accounts, and both the interviewer's and child's attempts to elicit and provide, respectively, specific details across the 3 interviews collected in a 1 month period. Across the 3 interviews, the child's account was largely generic, yet on a number of occasions she provided details specific to individual incidents (episodic leads) that could have been probed further. As predicted: earlier interviews were characterized more by episodic than generic prompts and the reverse was true for the third interview; the child often responded using the same style of language (episodic or generic) as the interviewer; and open questions yielded narrative information. We discuss the importance of adopting children's words to specify occurrences, and the potential benefits of permitting generic recall in investigative interviews on children's ability to provide episodic leads. Despite the fact that the testimony was characterized by generic information about what usually happened, rather than specific episodic details about individual occurrences, this case resulted in successful prosecution.