Competence and Chest Tubes
There is a model of skills acquisition and performance that nicely sums up how you get good at doing something. I forget the name, and I used to teach it to outdoor education students, but I was never good at remembering names (or numbers). The curve starts at “unconscious incompetence” - the inability to do something well and the lack of insight to know that there is a better way of doing it. In medicine I suppose a good example might be learning to take a history from a patient. Not knowing there is a useful structure and framework to getting all the salient information from a patient, a medical student or lay person would be forgiven for asking a few simple questions and not getting the key relevant details. The next level is “conscious incompetence”. You now understand that you are not yet competent at the task you are performing, you have insight. At medical school we are necessarily moved rapidly from “unconscious” to “conscious” performance; there’s not...