The importance of forgetting and painful retrieval for learning

This is another useful talk from HILT. One problem that bugs me with both undergraduate teaching and learning, and clinical expertise when you are qualified, is the dynamic between measures of competence at a defined time point, and the influence of exposure on the pattern of competence over time. People often assert that because you have some skill at timepoint X, that somehow ‘clinical exposure’ will maintain that skill over time ( I am not talking about revalidation here, simply because most accept as currently construed revalidation is not credible). However, keeping knowledge accessible is not just a function of formal learning, but a function of how often you encounter particular clinical problems. The dynamics are worth thinking about. To maintain competence for rare disorders, you must  encounter them at a certain rate. However, it seems to me possible that ‘routine clinical practice’  may not allow enough encounters to allow this competence to be maintained at the rate that is required. [So, the rate required to maintain competence, is greater than the rate at which you might routinely encounter the problem]. This is of course why we might use simulation, or attend clinical meetings, or spend much of our life talking about ‘cases’. If you want high level competence, you have to control the ratio of mundane to advanced case-mix. This is one of the reasons you need a hierarchy, and why a consultant delivered service, is not compatible with high level clinical competence (yes, I am skipping over a formal proof, here!). Some of this is at least tangentially related to this video by Robert Bjork — he of desirable difficulty). It is not exactly the rugby training mantra of no gain without pain, but something cognate; and that our tacit  yesteryear views of competence are being destroyed.