Perspectives
A Word From the President
Tuesday, April 25, 2017
Our Concerned Community
By Darrell G. Kirch, MD, AAMC President and CEO
Each spring, many of our AAMC constituent groups and councils hold meetings to discuss academic medicine’s current challenges and opportunities. Academic medicine is a large tent, and the AAMC represents many individuals with many different roles at our institutions, from physicians and researchers, to students and faculty, to deans and CEOs. But while the breadth of experiences and perspectives in academic medicine is broad, certain challenges are felt across our entire community. With significant uncertainty at the national level, I felt that it was important to attend as many group meetings as possible this spring to hear how different institutions and constituencies are affected by our national challenges.
Viewpoints
Tuesday, April 18, 2017
Raising the Bar: Helping Faculty Advance Learning with MedEdPORTAL
By Grace Huang, MD, Hospitalist at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and Editor in Chief of MedEdPORTAL®
With its focus on high-quality, peer-reviewed curricula, MedEdPORTAL® can support educators training the next generation of physicians and other health professionals.
Tuesday, March 07, 2017
Global Health Electives Provide Lessons in Patient Advocacy, Health Equity, Humility
By Majid Sadigh, MD, and Mitra Sadigh
For many medical students, training in a resource-limited setting is their first exposure to the way most of the world lives, where nylon gloves are used in place of catheters, where the number of radiation machines in a nation can be counted on one hand, where a bed shortage might mean patients sleep on the floor.
More than a century ago, medical students often had to buy tickets to attend lectures. Some schools even relied on ticket revenues to pay faculty. Today, those tickets are curious relics from the past, while the lecture continues as a staple of medical education.
But the traditional classroom lecture is going the way of the lecture ticket at some medical schools. That’s because many schools are eliminating lectures in favor of a “flipped classroom” model in which students study lecture content on their own and use classroom time to interact with peers and apply their newly gained knowledge to real-life scenarios.
“If you love teaching, there’s nothing quite like being in an active learning classroom,” said Bill Jeffries, PhD, senior associate dean for medical education at the University of Vermont Robert Larner College of Medicine.
Research on the effectiveness of the model—also known as “active learning”—is still emerging, but early indicators seem promising. For example, a large meta-analysis published in 2014 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found that undergraduate students in science, technology, engineering, and math performed significantly better in active learning environments than with traditional lecturing.
Academic Medicine in the News
Friday, May 26, 2017
Student-Run Clinics Provide Health Screenings at Homeless Shelters
During clinics at homeless shelters, students from Virginia Commonwealth University's schools of medicine, pharmacy, and dentistry provide blood pressure checks, cholesterol and glucose testing, and oral cancer screenings, among other services.
Friday, May 26, 2017
‘There are No Borders for Science’
The Department of Clinical and Translation Science at Creighton University School of Medicine turned its break room into a hub of international cooperation. Doctoral students, post docs and faculty exchange ideas, learn to appreciate one another's cultures and backgrounds, and discuss health challenges in other countries.
Friday, May 26, 2017
eiShare and eiResidency: A Two-in-One Game Changer for Medical Students
The web-based platform eiShare allows Einstein College of Medicine students to share study materials, collaborate on homework assignments, and study more efficiently.
