The effective teaching of clinical medicine is not easy. There are many competing demands for a clinician educator’s time that distract from teaching, including the need for clinical and administrative productivity, family expectations, and the required involvement with educational oversight committees. But I believe that the major underrecognized impediments to developing robust rheumatologic teaching programs filled with energetic and effective educators are (1) the relatively few practical and available opportunities for clinical faculty to participate in continued medical education (CME) activities directed toward advancing their teaching abilities, developing innovative educational programs, and enabling realistic self-assessment of their teaching skills; and (2) the lack of rigorously defined and uniformly accepted attributes of the successfully trained clinical rheumatologist1. As a professional community we need to support our teaching faculty in getting better teaching tools and refine our definition of the final product of professional training: the clinical rheumatologist.
The Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education (ACGME) several years ago promulgated the idea (that is, an expectation) that teaching programs should hold annual education program reviews (program self-assessment) and provide formal continuing education for their core teaching faculty on the components of effective teaching (personal self-assessment). On the ACGME Website (www.acgme.org/acWebsite/navPages/commonpr_documnts/VC_Evaluation_ProgramEvaluation_Explanation.pdf), this statement can be found: “Faculty participation in faculty development activities should be monitored and recorded... Activities should — over time — include not only CME-type activities directed toward acquisition of clinical knowledge and skills, but also activities directed toward developing teaching abilities...”.
Berman, et al2 are to be congratulated for communicating through the Journal of Rheumatology the Hospital for Special Surgery (HSS) rheumatology department’s advancement of the concept of providing ongoing education for its educators (addressing my point 1 above). As Berman, et al note, establishing a faculty development program in teaching is not a new idea. This …
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