Those responsible for teaching hospital medicine to residents and medical students had an unprecedented opportunity to become students for the day and learn from top teachers in the field.
An important new addition to the all-day precourses was the “Teaching Hospitalist Educators (THE) Course: What Clinical Teachers in Hospital Medicine Need to Know.” The session was presented by Jeffrey Wiese, MD, FACP, associate professor of medicine at Tulane University Health Sciences Center in New Orleans, and Mark Williams, MD, director of the hospital medicine program at Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine in Chicago.
“This pre-course was developed in response to requests from [SHM’s] Education Committee,” said Sylvia McKean, MD, chair of SHM’s Annual Meeting Committee. “It fold[s] in the best suggestions for hospitalist educators. It’s designed to shift those hospitalists who are responsible for education away from knowledge-only [teaching] and toward a performance-based focus.”
The pre-course used SHM’s The Core Competencies in Hospital Medicine as a framework to provide a competency-based model of physician education, one that emphasizes performance-based competencies such as procedures, practice-based learning, and “people skills.” This model can be adapted to teaching residents and students at the bedside as well as in conference rooms and large lecture halls.
“It went beyond curriculum,” said attendee Kevin O’Leary, MD. “It inspired people to think creatively about their own curriculum at home … it was an enlightened teaching model.”
The more than 85 hospitalist educators who attended the pre-course were asked to start a networking group to be called the SHM Educator Network, which will exchange resources and curriculum.
“The goal is for people to share talking points and generate additional tools,” Dr. Williams said. “There are lots of new faculty” teaching hospital medicine across the country. “They need training and they need resources.”