First there are medical students. We are faculty on their first-year selectives, offering a shadow experience. We staff the introduction to physical exam courses in second year. Third-year students rotate on our services, and seniors take our elective as well as taking acting internships on our teaching services. We act as mentors and interest group leaders. There is certainly more to this list. We also spend time teaching NP and PA students.
The internal medicine residents rotate on our hospitalist services, and we staff the general medical services. We interact with them daily when they are on consult services, trying to set a role model. General medicine, geriatric, and hospital medicine fellows rotate through as well.
We also teach the nurses on services and through in-services and daily rounds to cement the working relationship and improve communication. We teach each other. A day rarely goes by without a colleague passing on a tasty medical tidbit. (Of course, for me, a tabla blanca, no shortage of space for pearls). And finally we teach our patients and their families. Every day we do this, and if we don’t then we are missing the point of our profession entirely.
Each party—patient or student—has something to learn from us, but more importantly we have something to learn from them. Osler wrote that “The stimulus of their presence (the student) neutralizes the clinical apathy certain, sooner or later, to beset the man who makes lonely “rounds” with his house physician.”
One hundred years plus later, much of what was written is still true: Whether in a teaching institution or making “lonely rounds” we must strive to continue to educate ourselves, our colleagues, and our patients. And what better place to do it than the hospital? TH
Dr. Newman is the physician editor of The Hospitalist. He’s also consultant, Hospital Internal Medicine, and assistant professor of internal medicine and medical history, Mayo Clinic College of Medicine, Rochester, Minn.
Bibliography
Osler W (Sir) Aequanimitas. 1945. The Blakiston Company, Philadelphia. p. 311-327.