One of those moments was sitting in on the CLER (Clinical Learning Environment Review), or the new Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education institutional site visit process, which is not meant to be scary, but helpful! As a non-punitive visit, it’s meant to catalyze the necessary changes needed to help improve the learning climate in teaching hospitals. This session was particularly salient for me as I transitioned from being an associate program director into role of Director for Graduate Medical Education Clinical Learning Environment Innovation about a month ago.
At one point, Kevin B. Weiss, MD, MPH, FACP, described the CLER site visitors observing a handoff, and in that one moment, they saw the resident bashing the ER, failure of supervision, the medical students left out, and an opportunity to report a near miss that was ignored. Even though CLER is new, he made it sound like the site visitors were going back in time and nothing had changed. Have we not made a dent in any of these areas? I guess it’s probably safest to pretend like its 2003 and we need a lot more training in quality, safety, handoffs, supervision, fatigue, and everyone’s favorite … professionalism.
After being the only tweeter at times in the Group of Resident Affairs sessions, I ventured into the tweeting epicenter of the meeting at the digital literacy session. There, I not only learned about a very cool digital literacy toolkit for educators, but also got to connect with some awesome social media mavens who use technology to advance medical education. While I have access to these technophiles through Twitter (you know who you are), it was NOT the same as talking about the future of social media and medical education face-to-face. Call me old-fashioned, but connecting with this group over a meal was just what this doctor ordered. My only wish is that we had more time together.
Lastly, we went back to the future in our session showcasing the winners of the Teaching Value and Choosing Wisely Competition at both the AAMC and American Board of Internal Medicine Foundation meeting last week. One of the recurring themes that keeps emerging in these sessions, in addition to a recent #meded tweet chat, is that the death of clinical skills (history taking and physical exam) promotes overuse and reliance on tests in teaching hospitals. Could it be that by reinvigorating these bedrock clinical skills and bringing back the “master clinician”, we could liberate our patients from unnecessary and wasteful tests? I certainly hope so, and it can’t hurt to be a better doctor. Moreover, one of the most powerful tools that was mentioned was the time-honored case report! In fact, case reports have been resurrected to highlight avoidable care in a new JAMA Internal Medicine series called “Teachable Moments.”
And lastly, in the spirit of going back to the bedside, our MERITS (medical education fellowship team) submitted a video entry to the Beyond Flexner competition on what medical education would be like in 2033. While the impressive winners are showcased here, our nostalgic entry was aptly titled Back to the Future and Back to the Bedside, and envisioned a future where all students, regardless of their year, are doing what they came to medical school to do, see patients.
Vineet Arora, MD, is a Fellow of the American College of Physicians. She is Associate Program Director for the Internal Medicine Residency and Assistant Dean of Scholarship & Discovery at the Pritzker School of Medicine for the University of Chicago. Her education and research focus is on resident duty hours, patient handoffs, medical professionalism, and quality of hospital care. She is also an academic hospitalist, supervising internal medicine residents and students caring for general medicine patients, and serves as a career advisor and mentor for several medical students and residents, and directs the NIH-sponsored Training Early Achievers for Careers in Health (TEACH) Research program, which prepares and inspires talented diverse Chicago high school students to enter medical research careers. This post originally appeared on her blog, FutureDocs.
