Doctors As Teachers

All doctors have a professional obligation to teach, yet the training of doctors in how to be a teacher has received little attention in medical illegible]. This report examines various aspects of teaching in the medical profession including who provides the teaching, what challenges are faced in delivering this teaching and how the impact of these challenges can be reduced or eliminated.

It is often assumed that healthcare professionals are effective medical educators simply because they have completed the required courses leading to their degrees. As such, they are rarely trained or provided with the ongoing support needed to become consistently effective medical teachers. Developing effective medical teachers is a complex task that can best be achieved by providing teacher candidates with the understanding and tools they need to become effective. Although a thorough knowledge of medicine is necessary to become an excellent medical educator, earning a medical degree alone is not enough. A variety of factors go into a teacherâ (TM)s efficiency in any educational setting, and most teachers need guidance and practice in order to become effective. Among the many topics addressed in this text are teaching/learning; instructional objectives; teacher assessment; adult learning theory; the red flags of ineffective teaching; and the difference between equality and equity. This book will serve to educate doctors on how to better teach their students and current colleagues, and, most importantly, how to better educate their patients.

This book considers the evolution of medical education over the centuries, presents various theories and principles of learning (pedagogical and andragogical) and discusses different forms of medical curriculum and the strategies employed to develop them, citing examples from medical schools in developed and developing nations. Instructional methodologies and tools for assessment and evaluation are discussed at length and additional elements of modern medical teaching, such as writing skills, communication skills, evidence-based medicine, medical ethics, skill labs and webinars, are fully considered. In discussing these topics, the authors draw upon the personal experience that they have gained in learning, teaching and disseminating knowledge in many parts of the world over the past four decades. Medical Education in Modern Times will be of interest for medical students, doctors, teachers, nurses, paramedics and health and education planners.

A timely, authoritative, and entertaining history of medicine in America by an eminent physician Despite all that has been written and said about American medicine, narrative accounts of its history are uncommon. Until Ira Rutkow’s Seeking the Cure, there have been no modern works, either for the lay reader or the physician, that convey the extraordinary story of medicine in the United States. Yet for more than three centuries, the flowering of medicine—its triumphal progress from ignorance to science—has proven crucial to Americans’ under-standing of their country and themselves. Seeking the Cure tells the tale of American medicine with a series of little-known anecdotes that bring to life the grand and unceasing struggle by physicians to shed unsound, if venerated, beliefs and practices and adopt new medicines and treatments, often in the face of controversy and scorn. Rutkow expertly weaves the stories of individual doctors—what they believed and how they practiced—with the economic, political, and social issues facing the nation. Among the book’s many historical personages are Cotton Mather, Benjamin Franklin, George Washington (whose timely adoption of a controversial medical practice probably saved the Continental Army), Benjamin Rush, James Garfield (who was killed by his doctors, not by an assassin’s bullet), and Joseph Lister. The book touches such diverse topics as smallpox and the Revolutionary War, the establishment of the first medical schools, medicine during the Civil War, railroad medicine and the beginnings of specialization, the rise of the medical-industrial complex, and the thrilling yet costly advent of modern disease-curing technologies utterly unimaginable a generation ago, such as gene therapies, body scanners, and robotic surgeries. In our time of spirited national debate over the future of American health care amid a seemingly infinite flow of new medical discoveries and pharmaceutical products, Rutkow’s account provides readers with an essential historic, social, and even philosophical context. Working in the grand American literary tradition established by such eminent writer-doctors as Oliver Wendell Holmes, William Carlos Williams, Sherwin Nuland, and Oliver Sacks, he combines the historian’s perspective with the physician’s seasoned expertise. Capacious, learned, and gracefully told, Seeking the Cure will satisfy armchair historians and doctors alike, for, as Rutkow shows, the history of American medicine is a portrait of America itself.

This concise, easy to read title is designed for clinical teachers looking to refine their approach to teaching professional attitudes and basic skills to medical students. Doctors differ in values, training and practice setting, and eventually they adopt diverse approaches to patient interviewing, data collection and problem-solving. As a result, medical students may encounter significant differences in the clinical methods of their tutors. For example, some doctors encourage patients’ narratives by using open-ended questions while others favor closed-questions; and hospital- and community-based doctors may disagree on the value of the physical examination. Medical students may be puzzled by these differences and by controversies about issues, such as doctor-patient relations and the approaches to clinical reasoning. This handy title is intended to help tutors address many of these issues, and to provide an approach not only to teaching patient interviewing and the physical examination but to teaching some clinically relevant topics of the behavioral and social sciences that are so vital to developing an effective, well-rounded physician.

The ability to reflect on practice is a fundamental component of effective medical practice. In a sector increasingly focused on professionalism and patient-centred care, Developing Reflective Practice is a timely publication providing practical guidance on how to acquire the reflective skills necessary to become a successful clinician. This new title draws from a wide range of theoretical and practical multidisciplinary perspectives to assist students, practitioners and educators in embedding reflection in everyday activities. It also offers structures and ideas for more purposeful and meaningful formal reflections and professional development. Developing Reflective Practice: Focuses on the developing practitioner and their lifelong learning and the development of professional identity through reflection Provides practical how-to information for students, practitioners and educators, including realistic case examples and practice-based hints and tips Examines and explains the theoretical and conceptual approaches to reflective practice, including its models and frameworks.

ABC of Learning and Teaching in Medicine is an invaluable resource for both novice and experienced medical teachers. It emphasises the teacher’s role as a facilitator of learning rather than a transmitter of knowledge, and is designed to be practical and accessible not only to those new to the profession, but also to those who wish to keep abreast of developments in medical education. Fully updated and revised, this new edition continues to provide an accessible account of the most important domains of medical education including educational design, assessment, feedback and evaluation. The succinct chapters contained in this ABC are designed to help new teachers learn to teach and for experienced teachers to become even better than they are. Four new chapters have been added covering topics such as social media; quality assurance of assessments; mindfulness and learner supervision. Written by an expert editorial team with an international selection of authoritative contributors, this edition of ABC of Learning and Teaching in Medicine is an excellent introductory text for doctors and other health professionals starting out in their careers, as well as being an important reference for experienced educators.

This pamphlet presents the thoughts of six physician mentors in family practice and their third-year medical students, as they reflect on their practice and on their teaching or learning of clinical skills. An examination of the role of the family-practice physician as mentor may help teacher educators and cooperating teachers gain a valuable perspective on the common tasks and challenges that these two caring professions face in preparing the next generation of their members. The pamphlet analyzes the mentor's role in terms of: (1) the mentor's philosophy of care and how the mentor communicates his or her vision to students; (2) the nature of the physician's teaching and mentoring, particularly in regard to how the physician gives "bad news" and deals with difficult patients; and (3) helping prepare the newcomer to tolerate uncertainty and to reflect more critically on the daily experiences of medical practice. Lessons for teacher education are discussed, emphasizing that: competent cooperating teachers, like good medical mentors, are dedicated professionals who follow best practice and provide continual support and increasing autonomy to their students; cooperating teachers must make more explicit the model of problem solving and decision making they employ; and cooperating teachers need to develop ways to promote student teachers' critical reflection. (JDD)