Background: To obtain suggestions regarding the methods of cooperative learning in basic nursing education, the nursing students' perceptions of cooperative learning and the relationship between such perceptions and their influencing factors were elucidated.

Methods: Anonymous, self-administered questionnaires were conducted among 131 nursing students at University A in the Chubu region of Japan.

Results: Binomial logistic regression confirmed that cooperative learning experiences in high school, learning satisfaction at University A, social support, styles of handling interpersonal conflicts, and undervaluing others in regard to assumed competence were significant influencing factors on the cooperative work recognition scale.

Discussion: Factors, including professional identity, communication ability and students' past negative experiences, may have an effect on the recognition of cooperative work. This suggests the need for the continued investigation of the aspects of cooperative learning that take these factors into account.

Aim: We sought to compare the depression state of first-year residents, who were new to the system of clinical resident training, with those who had become completely familiar with the system.

Method: A questionnaire-based survey on stress reaction was distributed to 250 resident training hospitals in Japan. The survey was taken by 1,753 first year residents who started postgraduate clinical training in 2011. The survey was given to the students once before the training and-again months after the training had started. The results were compared with those from a similar survey in 2004.

Result: 3 months after the training had started, 30.5% of residents suffered from a depressive state. At that time, the prevalence of residents with newly developed symptoms of depression, who had no depressive state before the training, significantly decreased compared to those in 2004 (19.6 vs. 25.2%, p<0.001). The decrease of depressive state in 2011 may be due to the decrease of working hours, the improvement of stressor and stress-relieving factors.

Discussion: Many residents still experienced a stress reaction. Further improvement of the training environment should be considered.

Introduction: The best method of analyzing the overall ability of medical students is currently not known. However, we comprehensively analyzed summative assessments in order to characterize the capabilities of medical students.

Method: In 2014, 97 medical graduates, who were attending a national medical school, were asked to complete a computer-based test, a pre-clinical clerkship objective structured clinical examination (OSCE), a post-clinical clerkship OSCE, clinical clerkship assessment sheets, repetition of the same grade and the national examination for medical practitioners. Results were analyzed using multivariate analysis.

Results: In the principal component analysis, it was suggested that the first component indicates comprehensive academic achievement and the second component indicates engagement in clinical training. In the cluster analysis, clusters were classified by the values of the first and second components. In this analysis, the number of students who failed the national exam and repeated the same grade were significantly greater in each cluster.

Discussion: This study demonstrates that the comprehensive analysis of summative assessments could be used to clarify the capabilities of medical students.

1) A total of 73 incidents and accidents related to guidance provided to residents obtained from data published by the Japan Council for Quality Health Care were investigated.

2) These events can be divided into the following three categories: (1) Events that occurred during direct guidance to a resident by a supervising physician, (2) Events that occurred when a resident performed a procedure by himself or herself without the guidance of a supervising physician, although the supervising physician was near the resident, (3) Events that occurred when a resident performed a procedure by himself or herself while a supervising physician was absent.

3) Regarding measures to prevent recurrence, the present results suggests that, in addition to the individual efforts of supervising physicians and residents, there is a need for system development through increased cooperation between the postgraduate clinical training center, each section/department and the department of medical safety management.

　There is a growing interest in qualitative research among clinicians. However, because they are strongly influenced by the natural scientific philosophy that puts great value on the methodological correctness, these clinicians are usually overly concern with whether or not their method is appropriate. They tend to focus their energy on learning methods of qualitative research. In contrast, this paper argues that what is critical in qualitative research is not the method but the question. In qualitative research, method―which is defined here as a procedure of data analysis―is relatively simple and easy compared to various methods that quantitative research employs. Most of the methods in qualitative research merely explain how to semantically code data or chronologically sort it. For this reason, qualitative researchers should focus on the research question rather than the method and consider what kind of research question makes their targeted research field significant even if their sample size is small and their methods are not complicated. To produce valuable questions, this paper recommends that researchers take heed of the following five issues. (1) Researchers should suspend their aspirations of supporting their patients, patients' family members, and interns, and relativize their position as medical professionals. (2) They should conduct the pilot research so as to relativize their position and reflect the informants' perspectives on the research question. (3) & (4) They should endeavor to discover the theoretical framework shared by previous studies, and find a research question that only their collected research data is able to point out, one that previous literature has never argued. (5) They should avoid including abstract words such as experience, thoughts, and attitude in their research question and deconstruct these words into more concrete words so as to clarify their research interest. Lastly, this paper will introduce a research paper that has a significant research question and explain why this research paper is meaningful for clinicians who are interested in qualitative research.

　In these times of community-based integrated care systems, the spread of telemedicine is desirable. As requested by the Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare, the Japan Telemedicine Society has adopted and conducted "Telemedicine worker training." The purpose of this study is to report the results of a questionnaire taken by the participants of this training. There were 70 participants in total. The number of questionnaires returned was 47 (67.1%). The respondents were medical staff (36.2%), individuals directly related to a company (25.5%), hospital staff (17.0%), and concerned administrative persons (10.6%). As the respondents differed in terms of their knowledge of telemedicine, the results showed varying degrees of satisfaction with the training.