5 Tips for Residents New to Teaching Medical Students.

This article was migrated. The article was marked as recommended. Graduating from medical school is a time of transition that is filled with many responsibilities and opportunities. In a few short years, new physicians are expected to learn their trade and teach what they have learned to students along the way before being allowed to practice independently. As a medical student, trainees have the opportunity to learn from multiple providers from a range of specialties at all levels of training. Physicians in graduate medication education programs (i.e., residents) have a unique opportunity to provide training and teaching to medical students with a perspective that comes from being between the student and the expert attending physician. Whether students work with a resident during one day or over the course of several weeks, this time can be especially helpful in growing the student's knowledge base while honing the resident's teaching skills. The purpose of this article is to provide tips for resident physicians to use as they begin their role as teachers of medical students while balancing their responsibilities as trainees themselves. Many residency programs are developing formal resident as teacher programs to help facilitate their residents in becoming better teachers. These tips may be applied in such programs.

Development of a mechanically tuneable 3D scaffold for vascular reconstruction.

Material compliance has been shown to be a predictor of vascular graft patency and as such is a critical parameter when designing new materials. Although ex vivo derived materials have been clinically successful in a number of applications their mechanical properties are a direct function of the original vessel and are not easily controllable. These investigations describe an approach to modulate the mechanical properties of an ex vivo derived scaffold by machining variable (discrete) wall thicknesses to control compliance. Human umbilical arteries (HUAs) were machine lathed directly from the umbilical cord at wall thicknesses of 250, 500, 750, and 1000 µm then decellularized using 1% sodium dodecyl sulfate. Compliance over physiological pressures, increased from 3.08 ± 1.84% to 11.47 ± 4.11% as direct function of each discrete vessel diameter. Radial stress strain analysis revealed primary and secondary failure points attributed to the discrete layers within the anisotropic scaffold. Maximum strength and suture retention were shown to increase with increasing wall thickness, by contrast stress failure decreased with increasing thickness due to increasing proportions of the mechanically weaker amorphous Wharton's jelly. Reseeded smooth muscle cells were shown to adhere, proliferate, and migrate from the scaffold surface showing the potential of the HUA as a mechanically "tunable" material with applications as an acellular implant or as a tissue engineered construct. © 2012 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Biomed Mater Res Part A: 100A:3189-3196, 2012.