Diary of a medical educator

A few months ago I was invited to give a short presentation to inspire medical educators to involved in educational innovation and research. They were from different departments and levels of experience as educators. I started talking to them about a beautiful garden, like the one in this picture: Everyone would love to spend time there, now that it looks this way. But I wonder if we would all happily pay the price of doing gardening work, working early morning to prepare the land or be willing to sacrifice precious time in doing so. It is exactly the same on research. There will be lots of time, sometimes even years before our publications can see the light of day. Then why would we do it? -           Well it is complicated just to try just to apply what we see already published in the international literature, and make it work in our settings. There are substantial differences in our settings. -  ...

Last year I had the amazing opportunity to start a FAIMER fellowship in the beautiful city of Santiago, Chile. I started this program with a proposal to develop a VR setting to contribute to a patient safety culture. For me, it was a personal journey, as I got involved in this theme because my family and I experienced it in first hand when my mom had surgery. This project, allowed me to get to know the FAIMER family. This program was developed to improve world health through education, through a powerful community of very committed people.   These family, that I did not know that I had, were willing to provide feedback, learn together, and sometimes even being a shoulder to cry on. In this learning community, I have met the kindest people I have ever known, but most importantly, we are dreaming together about how to make the world a better place. I wouldn’t dare to say we have everything figured out, but we are doing something. I want to share a picture with you of la...

Traditionally, these professors in medical schools have had a solid preparation in their discipline and seek to transmit this knowledge and experience to their students. It is often expected that these physicians, without previous training in educational practice, offer quality teaching as a complement to the provision of services (Konerman, Alpert and Shashank, 2016); however, medical educators need to pursue formal training in education. It could be a workshop on your own institution, a fellowship or even a master’s program. However, considering that medical education is a field, and not a discipline, the faculty profiles that one can find in the teaching centers are wide. Most of the faculty development programs are generic to try to accommodate as much as the professional profiles they received, I would definitely recommend any developers and CPD leaders to tailor the programs to the specific needs of their context. Last year, we had an amazing opportunity to work with the AMEE...