3 Putting Skills Together as it Matters in Clinical Practice

It is thought that learning skills separately, or “chunking” them if you will, into palatable bites is less stressful on our brain.  By practicing, we become better and better and better at these given skills until we become competent.

One can think of this as learning a dance, we learn parts separately, then put it all together in one fluid event, made up of smaller parts.

The important part to skill building is to have feedback by a competent or proficient skill user as we practice, to guide us in the proper technique.  “There’s the rub!”  (Hamlet’s famous line means “the biggest problem”) is that often the proficient person at a skill, does not always remember what it was like to be a novice or advanced beginner and hasn’t a clue as to how to help them!   Luckily we know that some of the best teachers of a new skill are the new learners themselves once they pick up the skills as they can communicate to their peers in an understandable way as they just experienced their own breakthrough vs. it being a distant memory.   We have a team of SkillsPAC students (Peer Assistant Coaches) and house officers who are knowledgeable recent graduates to help you learn!

The next step is to use these skills together as it matters in clinical practice.  The idea is to become comfortable with our skills so that they become automatic, so our brains can focus on the formulation of a plan for our patient and adjust as needed.  Then, after much practice over years we become proficient.   The good news is once we attain proficiency, it is thought we can tune up our skills every 6 months or so. vs. the previous ongoing practice, practice, practice to attain proficiency.

We all learn skills at different rates and have different affinities for skills.  One can improve hand eye coordination with practice, but be careful not to over do it, practice with feedback and stopping on a high note is much more important than practicing to exhaustion then making mistakes at the end of a long arduous practice session as our brains tend to remember the last thing learned…