2009 Day 1 3:15-4:15 Tim Willett : Total Pain Project

From OUCEL Wiki

PDF of Presentation

• This project received the 2009 Alan Blizzard Award [1]

• The idea of collaboration is about sharing, knowledge building, and interactions, about coming to a consensus and about respect among different roles;

• Different persons come with different levels of knowledge, different points of view, and from different backgrounds, and they need to work together toward a common goal;

• Activity theory – (‘knot working”) – worldviews that everybody brings to the table sometimes produce tensions; tensions force us to reconsider our points of view;

• Learning occurs when this tension exists and reconsideration takes place;

• In order to enable collaborative learning, we need to create a knot – some problem that will create tension; the ‘knot’ is always very deliberately designed;

• Collaborative learning involves: participants (it can be a homogeneous group or not); a knot (a central issue), an environment where learning will take place; structure;

• The ‘Total pain project’ was designed for medical students; in medicine – it is important that different professionals collaborate;

• How do we present a patient? It was decided to use a narrative from the patient’s perspective; this patient (Neil) has multiple problems, he is also a politically hot patient (gay patient who is suffering from cancer);

• A tool that was built has different modules and is written in Java; students can visit Neil; they can have synchronous discussion, there is an electronic medical record, resources and progress notes (similar to wiki; different people can add new information);

• At the end – students need to produce a comprehensive case plan – this is done synchronously in the last session, which is face-to-face and is 3 hours long;

• Knot in this exercise is Neil, the patient

• Students cannot go through all places in a time limit; they need to prioritize but also to understand how their different roles (a doctor, a nurse, a social worker) intersect;

See Total Pain [2]