Research opportunity - ultrasound workshop

Here's some information on the OB ultrasound workshop and a possible research opportunity for a resident:

As you all probably know, Dr. Brost is one of the higher ups at the simulation center.

He has a big interest in research on medical education. He's been thinking about teaching residents ultrasound. He has some pretty interesting ideas and has a goal of developing a reproducible curriculum for family medicine residents (specifically family med, but also OB residents, ultrasound techs, etc...). The current training format for everyone who's learning ultrasound is to be thrown into it and see how far you can get in 5 minutes or so.

In the process, you fumble around and look like you don't know what you're doing, at least at the start.

Ultimately, it would be nice if the biggest part of the learning curve happened in the simulated environment.

The simulation center has 3 machines set up for OB ultrasound.

Dr. Brost has already designed learning materials or lesson plans for (no particular order):
1) identifying stomach, kidneys, diaphragm, spine, extremities, ?bladder on fetal pigs
2) measuring crown-rump length
3) identifying the yolk sac
4) measuring cervical length (in development)
5) using M-mode
6) AFI
7) BPD
8) turning dials and knobs and looking smart

He would like to study how we learn to become proficient in using the ultrasound for specific tasks like these.

From our training standpoint, it looks like we've got a session at the simulation center on 10/22 in the afternoon.

Dr. Brost was thinking that this could be a good "kick-off" for a more frequent learning program on ultrasound use. At this point it would tentatively be lunchtimes at the simulation center with no more than 3 residents at a time (one learner per ultrasound machine).

The simulation center has the capability of getting statistics on times at task and other metrics while the residents are learning, so that kind of data would be used in the research.

Specific research questions wouldn't just be how long it took to get proficient in x, y, or z, but also what the definition of proficiency would be for each task. So this would involve coming up with what are the goals fore each station and what are the goals for testing. For instance, measure the femur length in 2 minutes.

He's offering himself as a resource. He's also going to try to get the MFM fellows to assist in the sessions.

An aside: he showed me a demo on a fetal pig which was a little weird, but surprisingly similar to a human fetus (except for the snout and the hind legs). Anyways, he wants people to leave this with a systematic approach to the ultrasound. Find your landmarks and then proceed. It's really neat.

The bottom line:
1) this would be good for us individually, our program, Mayo, and potentially all Family Medicine Programs as an ultrasound training curriculum. Ask Dr. Matthews or Bonacci if education research is important. It is, and Mayo loves it. Brost was talking a lot about that.
2) I'd like to be a part of this, but I'm not interested in OB that much and I'm a third year. This is more geared for someone who has a few years to really see this through. I need volunteers to work on this and it will be a little bit of work, but not too bad. If you're actually interested in OB, I think it would be great.
3) Two early on goals are getting things ready for the 10/22 workshop and preparing a poster presentation for the FM forum. This isn't that big a deal, and I would help with it.