Improving the Medical Education System via an Analytical Approach: Fabio Nascimento, MD

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The clinical fellow at Massachusetts General Hospital discussed his approach to highlighting flaws within the medical education system and the need to do so for certain areas in epilepsy.

"Hopefully this will lead to other centers, researchers, clinicians, and educators to create curriculums to improve this. Then we’ll see it pop up in different places until we have a nicer structure of how to educate trainees about this.”

Recently published research in Neurology demonstrated an alarming lack of sudden death in epilepsy (SUDEP) knowledge for both national and international adult neurology trainees, raising questions about the training education targeted at this group. While a large majority of US residents reported being familiar with the term SUDEP (97%) and its definition (93%), familiarity with its risk factors was reported by 61% of respondents and potential mitigation SUDEP strategies by 63%.

The data also showed that about half of national (49%) and international trainees rarely or never counseled patients on SUDEP, despite the majority reporting having seen at least 45 patients with the condition during their training. Lead author Fabio Nascimento, MD, has taken this analytical approach to medical education before, with previous research showing inconsistencies in teaching and evaluating residents on electroencephalogram (EEG).

Nascimento, a clinical fellow at Massachusetts General Hospital, hopes that his studies will open the eyes of some program directors and entice them to take a deeper look into the practices currently in place. He sat down with NeurologyLive to provide background on the reasons for taking this type of approach and why implementing more requirements or milestones may improve overall SUDEP knowledge among adult neurology trainees.