Mental Practice: Moving From Sports Psychology to Medical Education

For clinical practice, including high acuity, low occurrence procedures which may not be encountered frequently in the clinical environment and are difficult to practice with high fidelity and frequency in a simulated environment. Mental practice is a form of a cognitive walk-through that has been shown to be an effective method for improving motor and cognitive skills, with a deep supporting literature in sports science and emerging evidence supporting its use in medicine. In this session, we discuss the background of mental practice, originating heavily in sports psychology literature, as well as the neurocognitive basis for this type of learning. We then highlight a focused review of recent healthcare literature around mental practice. Finally, we discuss how you can utilize mental practice in your own training or continuing education using a model (PETTLEP), and provide a breakout session to create your own mental imagery script for a procedure of your choosing. After this session, you will be able to describe mental practice and its potential role in medical training and continuing education. Importantly, you will also have the tools to formulate your own mental imagery scripts for yourself or colleagues.

Presenters:

  • Spenser C. Lang, MD
  • John Elliott Schneider, MD
  • Maxwell Blodgett, MD
Authors

  • Spenser C. Lang, MD

    University of Cincinnati College of Medicine

    I am currently an assistant professor of Emergency Medicine at the University of Cincinnati. I trained at Northwestern University EM in Chicago, and joined the faculty at Cincinnati after graduation in 2018. I also serve as an APD and the Director of Simulation for our residency program. In this role, I have an interest in medical education through simulation, bedside teaching, and junior learner mentorship.

  • John Elliott Schneider, MD

    Washington University in St. Louis

    Medical School: University of Missouri - Columbia. MD Class of 2017
    Residency: Washington University in St. Louis: Class of 2021
    Fellowship: Medical Education, Virginia Commonwealth University: Class of 2023


    My main interests are in exploring how techniques in mental rehearsal and imagery, deliberate practice, and spaced repetition can be integrated into curricula that addresses skill and knowledge decay. I think this applies for all learning, but I am particularly interested in studying this in high acuity, low occurrence procedures and events as well as novel skills. From a more broad outlook my goals are to be innovative and improve how we integrate and assess active learning strategies within formal and informal curricula.

  • Maxwell Blodgett, MD

    Christiana Care Health System

    Maxwell Blodgett is an academic faculty member at the Christiana Care Emergency Medicine residency and is an Azssistant Professor of Emergency Medicine at Sidney Kimmel Medical College/Thomas Jefferson University. He is a graduate of Robert Wood Johnson Medical School and from the Harvard Affiliated Emergency Medicine Residency at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center. He completed a medical education fellowship at Temple and is enrolled in the Master of Education in the Health Professions at Johns Hopkins University

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