See One, Do One, Teach One

Medical education has changed dramatically over this century, as has pediatrics and child health care. In this month's Pediatrics electronic pages , the article titled “Teaching Pediatric Procedures: The Vancouver Model for Instructing Seldinger's Technique of Central Venous Access Via the Femoral Vein” raises many important issues and demonstrates a creative “made in house” solution to one of the challenges facing pediatric educators. Medical education has evolved from an apprenticeship (where it was essential to select the best possible mentor) to standardized forms of training with national examinations, problem-based learning, and consistent experiences via simulation, standardized patients, and objective structural clinical examinations. Not only has the form of education changed but our desire to evaluate various pedagogic methodologies and experiences has also increased. A whole discipline of medical education has resulted. These new approaches to education produce the opportunities to learn from the experience of others without having to invent new wheels. However, applying the educational discipline to pediatrics has been particularly challenging because every developmental stage of the embryo, fetus, infant, child, and youth has a different set of illnesses and problems imposed on different body sizes. Even the anatomic relationships change as the child grows. … Address correspondence to Judith G. Hall, MD, Department of Pediatrics, University of British Columbia and BC's Children's Hospital, 4480 Oak St, Room 2D15, Vancouver, BC, Canada V6H 3V4.