Modular Teaching in Forensic Medicine and Toxicology-II

Skill-based forensic training is an urgent need of forensic medicine department all over of the world to provide quality services. There is a gap in forensic knowledge and practice due to resource material, teaching methods, faculty resource development and training, unplanned training of faculty, arbitrariness in subject coverage, pattern of assessment of PG especially of clinical and surgical skills, poor working stations and primitive infrastructure available to them.

Aiming to provide some basic module for training, we started faculty development training workshop to meet this demand in phase wise manner in 2012. This program was termed as “Faculty Development Training Workshops on Standard Operative Procedures (SOP) for Medico-Legal Work and Modular Teaching in Forensic Medicine and Toxicology”. This training was aimed to add more skills among professionals to meet expectations of society and law. This faculty development programme was aimed to develop professional, technical, personal, communication and social skills in faculty to meet demands of 459 medial colleges in India. Such programs are likely to produce quality forensic services.

These workshops advocate, directed self learning (DSL) on a given module, outline of course and workouts were given in advance so that candidates were well sensitized and prepared on the topics. These workshops had components of leading-lecture-presentations, keydemonstrations, group discussion, hands-on exercises and sharing of experiences. Candidates were given pre and post workshop feedback forms to find the difference after exercises. This facilitates active-adult learning with enthusiastic participation of participants. Seven modules covered in the last workshop are discussed in detail in this article. We intend to restart these workshops in future.