Response to: ‘Driven to distraction and driving for excellence in ward round practice’ by Pucher and Aggarwal

[...]regarding whether selecting medical students rather than clinical staff was appropriate, the literature shows that it is junior doctors who are most susceptible to error-making within stressful environments. 4 5 In short, we selected final year medical students purposefully in order to prepare them for managing ward round situations they will soon encounter as new doctors. [...]we welcome the use of objective, validated scoring scales for ward round performance and commend Pucher et al 7 in their development of the Ward NOn-TECHnical Skills (W-NOTECHS) tool.