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
Thursday, May 18, 2017
Students ‘Hatch’ Support Tool for People Living With Depression
Medical students at the University of British Columbia Faculty of Medicine developed a tool that would encourage people living with depression to regularly assess their emotional health, while fostering deeper connections with family or friend.
Thursday, May 18, 2017
Camp Introduces Medical Jobs to Hawaiian Youth
As part of the Kauai High School's Teen Health Camp, students from the University of Hawaii John A. Burns School of Medicine taught casting and other skills to Hawaiian youth interested in the health professions.
Thursday, May 18, 2017
Researchers Discuss NIH Funding With U.S. Senator
During an April meeting, several University of Washington School of Medicine researchers told U.S. Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.) how National Institutes of Health funding cuts would affect their research and their careers.
