ARCH Model for Guiding Effective Feedback for Medical Learners by: Conor Walsh, M17
Although feedback is a vital component of medical education and is important to ensure that standards are met, providing effective and appropriate feedback can be difficult for medical students, residents, and practicing physicians. Oftentimes, feedback can be too general (thereby making it difficult to set specific goals), untimely (i.e. given several weeks to months after a rotation), or be given without an explicit plan for improvement.
Feedback is an integral part of the medical education process. Both learners and educators need to know how to give as well as receive valuable feedback. We all have areas we can improve upon and effective feedback is intended to guide future performance and growth.
Part of the role of educators is writing performance evaluations and giving feedback. PRIME+ provides a framework to help educators deliver narratives that more fully reflect observed performance and supports the telling of the “story” of the learner, provides context that helps students understand the feedback and gives reviewers the “big picture” of each student’s performance.
