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Contemporary evaluation for medical ultrasound teachers

Modern critical care practice is increasingly making use of ultrasound to improve bedside diagnostics and enhance patient safety. Physician teachers and mentors therefore need access to mechanisms that maintain learning and professional development of ultrasound learners. We present an exploratory assessment of Distance Travelled Analysis, a novel form of continuous cyclical evaluation used in the context of a Fellowship in Critical Care Echocardiography and a practical guide to applying it to your practice. We adapted the qualitative process of ‘Distance Travelled Analysis’ from vocational education to construct the evaluation tool. We used the tool to collect primary data from the Echo Fellow over a five-month period. The quality and trustworthiness of the subjective primary data-set was triangulated using reflective conversations, spontaneous positive storytelling, face-to-face questionnaires and a summative assessment. Distance Travelled Analysis successfully translated onto the study curriculum, offering purposeful and active evaluation. The tool was able to identify a critical incident and alerted stakeholders to negative change allowing contemporaneous rather than post hoc action. An unexpected finding was that the evaluation tool significantly impacted both learner and mentor creating active learning exchange. The study findings expose the importance of reflective conversation as a balancing component of Distance Travelled Analysis. This qualitative work lends weight to the potential for continuous evaluation in high stakes curricula. The process of Distance Travelled Analysis could offer curriculum evaluators an agile alternative to traditional retrospective evaluation methods, preventing evaluation from being too little too late.