CRITICAL INCIDENT ANALYSIS

Critical Incident Analysis

Critical Incident Analysis

Introduction

Critical incident reports are now being widely used in medical education. They are short narrative accounts focusing on the most important professional experiences of medical students, residents, and other learners. As such, critical incident reports are ideally suited for addressing values and attitudes, and teaching professional development. This manuscript describes critical incident reports and gives examples of their use, provides a theoretical underpinning that explains their effectiveness, and describes the educational impacts of critical incident reports and similar methods that use reflective learning. The author recommends critical incident reports as an especially effective means to address learners' most deeply held values and attitudes in the context of their professional experiences.

 Critical incident reports are short narrative accounts used in medical educational. As stories, they convey the basic fabric of life. Furthermore, these stories, written by medical students, resident-physicians, and faculty members, often speak from the heart. Although unpolished, written by amateurs, these narratives have the virtue of honest expression. They bear witness to the travails and challenges of becoming and being a doctor. As an educational tool, what distinguishes a critical incident is that it focuses on an event chosen by the writer as having especially influenced his or her professional development.

Standard instructions for writing a critical incident report for use in medical education are usually open ended. The writer is asked to describe an incident judged to be of great importance to his or her work as a physician. It could be a learning experience, an especially challenging or meaningful moment in medical practice, or an event witnessed by the writer that proved highly influential or even disturbing. At times, instructions are given more narrowly, for example, to write about a significant experience in residency training, an important interaction with a faculty member, or a relationship with a patient. These too harvest the meaningful experiences of trainees in the midst of intensely challenging but rich opportunities for professional development.

Tripp's Model

David Tripp suggests that the development of professional practice can be brought about by the analysis of significant events or "critical incidents" (Tripp, 1993) He writes:

"Incidents happen but critical incidents are produced by the way we look at a situation: a critical incident is an interpretation of the significance of an event. To take something as a critical incident is a value judgement we make, and the basis of this judgement is the significance we attach to the meaning of the incident."(Tripp, 1993, p.8)

The rational behind this kind of enquiry is so that teachers can develop their own theories based on evidence from their actual experience, rather than trying to take academic theory and make it fit into their unique situation. Like the meditation practice the idea is to bring awareness and concentrated attention to their practice or to particular aspects of it. They are scientists and the classroom is the experiment, but infect they too are the experiment... and each time something significant happens it is recorded and adjustments are ...