The Essential Role of Clinician as Teacher December 2, 2014 Guest Blog, SFMS Member MD, Meg McNamara, Preceptorship, UCSF Professor of Pediatrics 0 By: Meg McNamara, MD UCSF Professor of Pediatrics Co-Director, Foundations of Patient Care and Preceptorships Director of Preceptor Outreach, UCSF Office of Medical Education When I came to UCSF for residency in the early 1990s, I had no inkling that I would be here two decades later or that education would be such a large part of my medical career. It is inspiring and gratifying to teach the next generation of physicians, and a perfect complement to the immense privilege it is to care for patients. Many aspects of medicine have changed profoundly over the past two decades since my residency training, but the essential role of teachers to pass on their clinical wisdom and to foster the young physician’s professional-identity development remains constant. We are living and working through a massive cultural change within the field of health care, where the growth of medical knowledge and technologies as well as the information systems to manage them are rapidly evolving, outstripping the pace with which most people can realistically keep up on everything. Even with this dizzying pace of development and change, the key qualities of compassionate, conscientious, and competent care remain the core of what we value in clinical medicine. It is critical that we maintain these fundamental elements while educating the physician of the twenty-first century, who will also need to navigate the complex and emerging systems of information and health care delivery. Medical education is accordingly undergoing substantial transformation. The UCSF School of Medicine, along with the American Association of Medical College (AAMC), adopted a framework of key “competencies” that students are required to master prior to graduation, under the domains of patient care, medical knowledge, practice-based learning and improvement, interpersonal and communication skills, professionalism, and systems-based practice. Students are expected to progress through designated “milestones” on their way to achieving specific competency goals that certify their readiness for graduate medical education (GME) residency training. The emphasis within medical education at UCSF has shifted in recent years to focus heavily on the development of competence through “active learning,” critical reflection, and independent learning plans. In addition, professionalism and systems-based practice are now explicitly highlighted and considered as essential to the formation of the medical student as passing the board exams or performing the H&P. Students learn and master much of the material through small-group seminars or problem-based learning cases, team-based learning, skills-development workshops, laboratory sessions, instructional videos, and simulations involving “standardized patients” played by paid actors or via high-tech equipment such a mannequins or online scenarios. UCSF’s integrated curriculum is highly engaging, but there is still no substitution for students stepping into the “real world” of clinical medicine, and this is where the clinical preceptor’s role remains paramount. One of my roles within UCSF’s Office of Medical Education is to oversee all the clinical preceptorships for the pre-clerkship students, and I hear from the students about how deeply they value and appreciate these experiences. The clinical preceptorships are consistently highly rated because they introduce students to the special relationship between physician and patient and also provide opportunities to practice the skills they learn in on-campus sessions. Most of us recall a teacher who took a shine to us or illuminated something in a way that made it memorable. For any of you who would like the opportunity to pass the torch, I hope you will consider becoming a preceptor for this new generation of physicians. The effort involved in teaching—even in a busy and demanding practice—is richly rewarded and well worthwhile. If you have questions or interest in serving as a clinical preceptor, please contact us in the UCSF Clinical Learning Unit through Ivan Mendez (ivan.mendez@ucsf.edu). Click here to learn more about available UCSF preceptorship opporunities. Comments are closed.
