Good communication makes our work interesting, richer and deeper

Good communication makes our work interesting, richer and deeper. But empathy may dry up over time, hence the need to refresh/recharge periodically.

The most open question is "How are you?" The direction a patient chooses offers valuable information during this first "golden" minute in which you are silent.

Share management plans: "What can we do about this"? Unless you become patient-centered, your patient may never be satisfied with you, or fully cooperative.

Every hospital has a department of reflection. It exists in your mind, don't forget to visit there from time to time.

These are excerpts from the Oxford Handbook of Clinical Medicine. Read more on page 4, Asking questions:



Here is the famous Cleveland Clinic video "Empathy: The Human Connection to Patient Care: Patient care is more than just healing -- it's building a connection that encompasses mind, body and soul. If you could stand in someone else's shoes . . . hear what they hear. See what they see. Feel what they feel. Would you treat them differently?"

The challenges of widening participation in PISA

by Andreas Schleicher
Director, OECD Directorate for Education and Skills
Claudia Costin
Senior Director, Education Global Practice, World Bank

Since 2000, the OECD Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) has been measuring the skills and knowledge of 15-year-old students in over 70 countries. PISA does not just examine whether students have learned what they were taught, but also assesses whether students can creatively and critically use what they know.

Of course, such international comparisons are never easy and they aren’t perfect. But they show what is possible in education, they help governments to see themselves in comparison to the education opportunities and results delivered by other education systems, and they help governments to build effective policies and partnerships for improving learning outcomes.

But as the number of countries joining PISA kept rising, it became apparent that the design and implementation models for PISA needed to evolve to successfully cater to a larger and more diverse set of countries, including a growing number of middle-income and low-income countries who want to participate in the assessment.

In response to these challenges, the OECD and the World Bank just released a report titled The Experience of Middle-Income Countries Participating in PISA 2000-2015, which provides valuable lessons and insights based on the experiences of more than 40 PISA-participating countries. It establishes a strong rationale and foundation for enhancing PISA to make it more relevant to a wider range of countries. It also provides insights for the World Bank and other development partners on how to better support countries to participate in these exercises and to analyse and use the data in effective ways.

The report shows that while demand for participation in PISA among middle-income countries is increasing, these countries face both financial and technical obstacles to participating, including the need to translate and manage the assessment, and code student responses. The report also shows that the political, regulatory, and cultural environment of these countries can also affect whether, and how easily, the assessment can be conducted.

To maximize the benefits of participating in PISA, the report recommends that the OECD take five actions:

1. Adjust the PISA test instruments to better measure differences between the highest- and lowest-performing students and, in particular, distinguish performance differences at the lowest levels of proficiency;
2. Revise the contextual questionnaires so they are more relevant to low-income country contexts and policy issues;
3. Evaluate the impact of PISA participation on middle-income countries’ capacity to conduct international assessments; 
4. Tackle financial and technical challenges through partnerships with donors and through capacity building; and
5. Extend outreach to local stakeholders in these countries.

Action is already being taken on these recommendations through the PISA for Development initiative. This project is already working to enhance the PISA instruments and will undertake field trials in seven developing countries during 2016. The final results of PISA for Development, which are expected in 2018, will provide local policy makers with new evidence to diagnose shortcomings in their education systems and inform new policies. In the meantime, the PISA for Development countries will benefit from peer-to-peer exchanges with other members of the PISA global community. The enhanced PISA instruments will be made available to all countries for the 2021 cycle of the assessment.

The OECD remains committed to working with the World Bank and other partners in maintaining and developing PISA as a global yardstick for measuring success in education. This is especially relevant in the context of the recently adopted Sustainable Development Goals as PISA provides valuable information about the level and distribution of quality and equity within a country’s education system.

Together, we will continue to contribute our expertise and platforms to encourage international collaboration on education through the PISA surveys, and to assist policymakers and practitioners throughout the world to use them more productively. 

Links:

The Experience of Middle-Income Countries Participating in PISA 2000-2015
Network on Education Quality Monitoring in the Asia-Pacific

For more on PISA for Development, visit: www.oecd.org/pisa/aboutpisa/pisafordevelopment.htm
Related Working Papers:

• Towards the development of contextual questionnaires for the PISA for development study 
• PISA for Development Technical Strand C: Incorporating out-of-school 15-year-olds in the assessment
• PISA in Low and Middle Income Countries

Photo credit: © Istockphoto/Henk Badenhorst

App uses a network of smartphones to help research cancer: your phone crunches numbers while your sleep

The company DreamLab says will allow users to "donate" their smartphone's processing power while their owners are sleeping:

"Cancer affects so many of the people we love. But what if you could help by speeding up cancer research, simply by going to bed. Researchers are hindered by limited access to supercomputers. So that’s where you and the DreamLab app come in. It’s a free to purchase app* that uses the processing power of your idle phone to solve a piece of the cancer research puzzle. If just 1,000 people used the app, cancer puzzles would be solved 30 times faster."

http://www.vodafone.com.au/aboutvodafone/vodafoneaustraliafoundation/dreamlab



"When a phone is plugged in and fully charged, it is sent a tiny genetic sequencing task by Australia's Garvan Institute of Medical Research to solve. When it is completed, the data is sent back to the Garvan Institute, which can use it as part of their research.

Users can select what project they want to contribute to, whether it is breast cancer, ovarian cancer, pancreatic cancer and prostate cancer. According to Vodafone, 1,000 smartphones using the app can speed up research by 30 times.

While the service can use a significant amount of data, users can choose limits of 250MB, 500MB and 1GB to send, with the data free for Vodafone Australia customers, or available to send over WiFi."

References:

Vodafone app turns your smartphone into a powerful cancer research machine - Telegraph http://buff.ly/1iNFvnr
App creates 'smartphone supercomputer' to cure cancer http://buff.ly/1NZgbpD
DreamLab - Android Apps on Google Play http://buff.ly/1kkrhfm