Another Step Forward: A Novel Approach to the Clinician Educator Track for Residents
It is critical in graduate medical education that we teach residents how to be effective teachers. From a practical standpoint, residents are often placed into teaching roles, whether formally in a classroom setting or on the wards when working with and supervising medical and allied health students. The Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education (ACGME) has considered teaching to be a sufficiently important aspect of career development to warrant its own subcompetency within the Psychiatry Milestones (PBLI3) [1] Additionally, throughout the Milestones, one finds that the highest level of achievement is often obtained when the resident is able to demonstrate the ability to teach the subject matter [1] However, the literature on adult learning theory demonstrates that teaching adults is a unique skillset that requires specific and focused training to be accomplished most effectively [2 6] This is certainly not a novel concept. In 2010, an entire issue of Academic Psychiatry was devoted to highlighting creative solutions to our field's increasing reliance on using residents as teachers [7] More recently, a 2013 national survey of psychiatry residency program directors indicated that the majority of programs provide formal instruction to residents about how to teach, though there was great heterogeneity regarding the skills taught and the methods and materials used [8] It is also clear that when programs focus on training residents how to be better teachers, it improves their confidence with this skill [9] To this end, several tools have been developed to assist training programs in evaluating residents' teaching abilities [10] For those who wish to continue their careers in academia as a clinician educator, teaching will be a core component of their professional life. However, it is only one aspect of what is required to be successful. Clinician educators are expected to engage in academic scholarship, take on administrative roles as part of or in addition to their clinical duties, and learn how to balance these competing interests. Despite the importance of these different tasks and the role that training could play to help develop them there may be relatively few opportunities during residency to learn how to develop expertise across this wide range of skills. To address this practice gap, several institutions have implemented novel training programs to enhance the teaching skills of their residents and prepare them for careers as clinician educators. There are two general approaches residency programs have pursued to address this practice gap, as will be described in greater detail in the "Background" section below. The first are 1 year programs that provide post graduate year (PGY) 4 residents the opportunity to have protected time in their final year of residency devoted to learning about and engaging in the practice of medical education. The second approach consists of implementing "educational track" programs that, following an application process, admit a select group of residents from within the residency program early in their training and provide them specific teaching focused education and experience throughout their residency. Here, we describe an approach to the clinician educator track for residents, started at the Yale University School of Medicine in 2011, which builds on the success of previously described programs and adds additional unique elements. The Yale Clinician Educator Track represents a hybrid approach to those previously described in the literature, with early timelimited preparatory experiences in the PGY2 and PGY3 years Tobias Wasser tobias.wasser@yale.edu
Academic Psychiatry