Viji Kurup, MD

The focus of my research in in developing effective and efficient methods of teaching for anesthesia residents and in assuring a safe and stress free environment for learning.

Current projects:

International: I am the Chair Designee for the Committee on Outreach and Developing world for society for education in anesthesia (SEA)- (www.seahq.net). My objectives for this year are

1. Developing crisis resource management tools like algorithms and making them handy for use in remote locations
2. Developing a document with tips for teaching for residents going overseas
3. Cofounder of Sim Worldwide (sww.etsu.edu). This is a website dedicated to increasing collabaration among medical schools in the US and abroad. Currently we transmit selected teaching sessions to the developing world. We have schools in India, Thailand, ElSalvador, China and Switzerland who log on to the sessions. We have one way video transmission and two way chat. This enables the session to be interactive for the audience abroad.

National:

1. Director of a monthly e-learning module for the PGY1 students who are coming into our program in anesthesia called the START (Successful transition to Anesthesia Residency Training) program- This is a collaboration with Stanford Anesthesia (Dr Larry Chu) who initiated the very successful program there. In this project we shoot short videos of pertinent topics which follow a trigger video to reinforce basic concepts in anesthesia to residents.

Yale

1. Yale Media Lab: We are currently involved in making videos for teaching. Garrett Sendlewski is the Associate at the media lab.
2. Flipped classroom evaluation of course model.
3. Simulation- We use simulation to reinforce important concepts for our residents. Currently we are designing scenarios and testing them before applying to practice.
4. Co-founder of an anesthesia multimedia website (www.anesthesiaillustrated.com). This is a collaboration with Stanford Aim Lab, again under the direction of Dr Larry Chu. The goal is to create a library of education media that can be used by faculty and students in the specialty for learning and teaching.
5. Building a patient education website for anesthesia with information we got from the survey of our pre-operative patients.
6. Using flashcard app to create flashcards for anesthesia residents to prep for their board exams.
7. Creating a curriculum for teaching residents how to teach. This will be focused on residents who want to learn more on teaching and learning theories.
8. Studying the effects of a wellness curriculum on stress and burnout markers in anesthesia residents.