Diary of a medical educator

You would not believe me, but I am writing this piece at more than 10,000 feet high. I am on my way to the Latin American Conference of Residency Education (LACRE) in Santiago, Chile. I will be presenting one of the previous studies that we ran for my doctoral project. I will be discussing the topic of how professional culture influences professional identity on medical educators. Professional identity refers to how they see themselves, and life itself. Members of a profession share knowledge, values and attitudes. Professional culture, as described by Hargreaves & Fullan (1991), could be categorized into individualized, balkanized, per project collaboration, and extended collaboration. -           Individualized: refers to a medical educator focused on the service provided to the students. Every professor in the educational setting would be focusing on his own subject, and not about the curriculum as a whole. -   ...

This question resonates to the bones…medical students have participated for centuries accompanying expert physicians observing their consultations, visits and even surgeries to learn from the medical practice in situ (Valdez-García, 2007). This has been the prevailing way in which training of new professionals is carried out; however, the profession itself has advanced considerably in the last hundred years through the development of credentialing processes, and ethical standards (Steinert, 2012). This has created multiple career opportunities within the area of ​​health. In addition to the opportunity for doctors to do a medical residency, and dedicate themselves to clinical-care, they can pursue a career as educators, researchers or a mixture of these. Being of particular interest these last ones which have been recognized in multiple studies as academic doctor, medical teacher, clinical educator or medical educator (Salcedo, 2016, Schuwirth and van der Vleuten, 2006, Roberts,...