Issue Five 2023 Editor's Pick

 

Making Implicit Uncertainty Explicit

 

I’m guessing many of you are like me and wish COVID-19 was behind us.  It is amazing how that experience somehow keeps resurfacing!  The paper I chose from the most recent issue of Academic Emergency Medicine Education and Training as my editor in chief pick is entitled Making decisions “in the dark”: Learning through uncertainty in clinical practice during COVID-19.  The authors of this manuscript are from Sidney Kimmel Medical College at Jefferson University and Teachers College at Columbia University.  

I found the article very interesting, and I encourage you to read it.  We can all agree that working through the uncertainty of the COVID-19 pandemic was challenging.  In this article, the authors through the lens of constructivist and grounded theory queried individuals on their decision making and explored how informal and incidental learning emerged in the complex and uncertain clinical environment of the emergency department and intensive care unit.  

They uncovered multiple themes in their study that educators should take into consideration when training future emergency medicine physicians.  We have an opportunity to develop curricula, so our residents are prepared to deal with uncertainty in the future by making implicit uncertainty explicit.

Susan B. Promes, MD, MBA
Penn State College of Medicine
Editor-in-Chief