SPECIAL: OFFICE-BASED MEDICAL STUDENT TEACHING

The Primary Care Network Faculty Development Program

LuAnn Wilkerson, Ed.D.

In mid-1999, four physicians within the UCLA Healthcare Primary Care Network (PCN) were solicited to begin a program to "teach the teachers." While these physicians were well trained, they had come from a wide variety of programs with different educational experiences. The group was formed to help set a standard for teaching amongst all the physicians in the PCN.

While it is true that the physicians in the PCN teach in a variety of settings, the greatest emphasis has been on the training of medical students in the office. As such, while many of the PCN faculty members teach on the wards or in the resident clinics, or teach on-campus in the Doctoring Program or the Fundamentals of Clinical Medicine course, the majority sees students within the confines of the PCN offices.

Each faculty physician in the PCN has a commitment to devote approximately 10% of his or her time to medical education. A standard set of strategies for fulfilling this commitment can be helpful in optimizing the educational experience of the students and facilitating the work of the preceptors. The PCN Faculty Development Team spent a year developing a set of workshops to assist their colleagues in exploring specific approaches to ambulatory education with demonstrated effectiveness. This year, the Team offered the four educational workshops as part of the PCN Continuing Medical Education Program. The articles that follow describe each of the teaching strategies addressed in the workshop series on teaching.

The goals of the PCN Faculty Development Program are:

• To make physicians within the PCN more aware of their potential for more effective teaching interactions and of the availability of a multiplicity of teaching strategies.

• To help PCN physicians appreciate what they are already doing effectively, and conversely, to help them understand how they might be even more effective as they work with students.

• To help establish standards for teaching medical students both in the office and in other teaching situations.
  
  


• To create a system that will allow for effective self-evaluation by the physicians.

The program is organized around a student-centered approach to education. The four workshops have been designed to assist participants in accomplishing the following objectives:

1. To be able to assess each student's needs and to teach to those needs.

2. To recognize teaching opportunities during patient care and know how to use those opportnities to maximize learning for an individual student.

3. To serve as effective role models for patient/physician communication and professionalism.

4. To effectively evaluate a student's clinicalcompetency.

5. To provide effective feedback.

6. To assess when a particular teaching approach is not working and how to select a more effective approach.