Mobile knowledge dissemination for clinical competencies education

Abstract

Finally, there remains a tendency to report successful innovations or their positive aspects. Although this is useful, authors should not fear sharing less successful innovations so the community is not doomed to make the same mistakes. As Warren Buffet put it, ‘It’s good to learn from your mistakes. It’s better to learn from other people’s mistakes’. Mubuuke Gonzaga, M. Rad, MSc. HPE, PhD College of Health Sciences, Makerere University, Uganda RGS provides a platform for educators in the health sciences to share experiences, opportunities, challenges and lessons learned when implementing novel and innovative ideas to improve training of health professionals. From my own experience reviewing these reports, I came to appreciate just how far educators are pushing the field to greater horizons. The diversity of projects showcases innovation and novelty across contexts. Although not all of them can be published in RGS, I will try to share here the lessons I learned from reading them. RGS demands brevity. Meeting word limits while still conveying the intended central message is no mean feat. It has, therefore, been exceedingly exciting for me to see how developers pack their message and describe their contexts in just 500 words. This has provided a great learning opportunity regarding how to write clearly and to the point. Many of the submissions I reviewed have the potential to be expanded and eventually result in fuller papers, but they demonstrated more words are not always required to disseminate key lessons to a wider audience. It was also noteworthy that many of the better projects I reviewed pushed boundaries beyond local contexts by framing overarching issues of relevance to address a more global goal. This seemed invaluable to enable other educators to draw lessons that can be applied in their own settings. For example, describing how a mentorship programme was started is good, but as a reader I would like to know what worked, what did not, and what needs to be improved. More than reading about success, what is useful for readers to know is the processes enacted, the challenges experienced and the insight gained. By focusing one’s writing in this way, a wider audience can be reached. Following the author guidelines, critically appraising the report to make sure that the central key message is evident and proofreading to make the language clear offer three additional crucial pieces of advice for preparing the RGS reports. Whether included or not, I was impressed by how well the comments from reviewers can be used to improve the projects described and hope that many, in the future, are turned into full papers.