The joy of teaching rounds

January 1980 I had my first experience as a teaching ward attending.  I loved it.  37 years later, I love it. I just spent most of 4 weeks traveling.  This Monday I started a 5 day stint rounding.  Each day I am excited.  As we discuss patients; as we see patients; I get more excited.  Our patients provide our students and residents so many opportunities to learn. Excellent inpatient internal medicine does require attention to many details.  Sometimes we need to carefully take the history.  Sometimes the physical exam gives us great information.  Other times we need to best interpret the laboratory tests. Sometimes we make diagnoses that make a huge difference.  Or we help patients understand their illness and improve their adherence to high quality treatment.  Often what we do is comfort patients who have a poor prognosis, but benefit from our caring. During teaching rounds we work on many dimensions.  Our first goal is to help our patients, but we also have a major responsibility to help our students and residents grow into great physicians. We help our learners with attention to details, explaining why we do things, and role modeling bedside communications. As I have traveled this spring, several times I have met with groups of clinician educators.  Each time they want to discuss the process of teaching rounds. I do believe that the process is not straightforward.  From the questions they have asked, most clinician educator struggle to find their way. I have ...
Source: DB's Medical Rants - Category: Internal Medicine Authors: Tags: Medical Rants Source Type: blogs