Welcome to the ICENet Blog! This is for people who live in two intersecting worlds – clinical practice and medical education. The International Clinician Educators Network started in 2011 and is represented on 5 continents. (Click here to read about the goals of ICENet) Connecting Clinician Educators is the goal of this blog.
In clinical practice, specialization is increasingly common – general practice, paediatrics, paediatric nephrology, paediatric transplant nephrology etc. The same phenomenon is starting to occur in medical eduation. Can you differentiate a clinician teacher, academic physician, education researcher, educationalist? Does it matter?
I’ve often struggled to define a Clinician Educator to colleagues and friends. While each university or academic organization seems to have some fuzzy definition, I’m not convinced that the global medical education community has settled on a definition.
So, what is a Clinician Educator? With Jason Frank and Linda Snell, we carried out a national study to answer this question. Using focus groups of thought leaders and a national survey of all Canadian deans, academic chairs and program directors, we developed a common definition. (Read the whole study at Academic Medicine)
Generally speaking, Clinician Educators are consultants to other health professionals on education issues. Our study suggests that a 21st century definition of a Clinician Educator includes the following attributes:
- Being active in health professional clinical practice;
- Applying theory to practice; and
- Engaging in education scholarship.
Our study concludes that academic leaders should consider actively developing the next generation of Clinician Educators to meet the challenges of 21st century health professional education.
What do you think?
Do we need greater ‘specialization’ in medical education?
What is the optimal training for Clinician Educators?
Leave a comment below!
