Recent changes in social needs and the health care system have prompted the development of new teaching strategies and methods in which active learning by students in small groups is emphasized. We created an “early exposure” training program to enable freshman medical students to obtain practical experience at medical and welfare institutions. This program was designed with the following features 1) student-centered and self-directed learning, 2) integrated education for knowledge, skills, attitude and ethics, 3) training in communication skills, and 4) tutor-assisted and small-group discussion. Tutors were recruited from basic medical science departments. In a self-evaluation survey, 92% of students found this early exposure training to be excellent or good. Most students achieved improvement in communication skills, attitude and ethics among the educational objectives. However, a few students did not fulfill any objectives, and thus we should consider further improvements in the tutorial system.

We introduced a compulsory medical ethics course for first-year medical students so that they would understand the basis of bioethics thinking and acquire the basic capacity to solve patients' clinical problems. The course consists of 14 school hours, of which 11 were for group discussion of 2 clinical cases and 3 were for whole-class lectures on various ethical issues. Identical, short ethics tests were given on the first and last days of the course. The acceptance level was evaluated on the basis of the score of the second test, reports submitted after group discussions, and class attendance. The scores of the second test correlated with the results of reports of the second clinical case but not with those of the first clinical case. Logistic regression analysis indicated that factors contributing to the acceptance level were the scores of the second test and the attendance rate, which was an independent contributing factor. Furthermore, the scores of the second test, but not of the first test, correlated with the acceptance level. These results indicate that this ethics course is useful for increasing students' thinking about ethical issues.

The purpose of this study was to evaluate the pilot usability used in a telenursing-based cancer pain monitoring system. Health care providers and advanced cancer patients who visited a hospital as outpatients (n=10/group) used and evaluated the system using a Web Usability Scale (WUS) and free description. Of the WUS seven factors, “comprehensibility” and “content reliability” received good evaluation, and “ease of operation”, “visual effects”, “responsiveness”, “usefulness”, and “acceptablity” didn’t received good evaluation. In the free description, the system was evaluated to enhance self-management of cancer pain, a request for expansion of operation, and social issues were shown. Improving patient usability is an issue, and sufficient orientation is required to verify the effects.