Table 2 Make teaching relevant to future practice

General

"Making it seem more relevant - it seemed really pointless at the time" (C7:241)

"If the need for this teaching in a doctor's professional career had been made more obvious" (C7:384)

Clinical practice

"Discussion of uses in day-to-day clinical work. Methods of explaining probabilities to patients and students" (C7:91)

"In my course not particularly linked at that time to clinical scenarios ... Explicit working through of cases and the decisions based on evidence available and risks and benefits I think would have been useful" (C7:190)

"They should learn enough to understand the validity, importance and relevance of research into all aspects of clinical policy and practice: aetiology, diagnosis, therapy, prognosis, as well as understanding research synthesis and guidelines. This should be integrated with clinical care and reflective practice. ... For example, students studying the nervous symptom [system] may be invited to look at studies of diagnostic accuracy for MRIs in multiple sclerosis and to look at RCTs for pharmacological interventions. Learning to take into consideration the sensitivity and specificity of clinical signs should be as important as knowing how to examine for them." (D1:200)

Research

"Forget the mathematics concentrate more on interpretation of papers" (C7:188)

"If it had been related to real research" (C7:404)

"Being made topical i.e. relating to current trials" (C7:341)

"Applied methods relevant to interpreting research papers and pharmaceutical company material" (D1:267)

"They need a thorough grounding in these subjects so that they can read papers critically and do audit and/or research with confidence" (D1:171)