Video Precepting

Video Precepting is an effective tool which is frequently used to

assess the psychosocial attitudes, knowledge, and skills of family medicine residents on the six ACGME core competences. Many video precepting strategies, tracking systems, and evaluation forms exist to enable faculty to evaluate residents’ developmental progress in a number of areas. As the Family Medicine Milestone Project provides new direction and guidance to the assessment of competency, video precepting will be an essential method of measuring performance and delivering effective feedback along the continuum from Level 1 to Level 5. However, the literature suggests physicians are poor self-evaluators (Eva & Regehr, 2005; Regehr, Hodges, Tiberius, & Lofchy, 1996).

Residents typically believe they asked questions that they did not ask, forget parts of the physical exam that they thought they completed, and are not aware of mindful of their own verbal and non-verbal behaviors. An important goal in video precepting, therefore, is teaching residents skills in self-awareness and self-assessment. The family medicine residency program has implemented a longitudinal intervention using video precepting not only as an evaluation tool, but also as a strategy to teach self-directed learning. Results of this initiative demonstrate that video precepting as an educational intervention facilitates more accurate self-assessment over time resulting in lasting changes in attitudes, knowledge, and skills. It is one of the most effective and efficient ways to bridge the gap between perceived behavior and the realities of physician behavior.

This initiative was featured in a presentation by Dr. Joe Biggs and Dr. Lindsay Fazio at the 34th Forum for Behavioral Science in Family Medicine.