Much has been said about Harvard Macy as a community of educators and leaders dedicated to transforming health care education. In addition to being a top course in research, teaching, and learning in health professions education, Harvard Macy is itself a community of practice, and thus a prime opportunity to grow your professional network. 

How can you enhance your networking while a Harvard Macy scholar? Here are 8 tips to consider: 

“Good morning! Coffee and snacks in the back. Before we get started – we’ve declared this a title free zone. That means no Mr., Mrs. or Dr. If you use a title, you’ll be donating $1 towards Georgetown’s student run free clinic for the homeless. The same goes for our speakers. We’re all in this together.” This was the welcoming message at our inaugural workshop committed to creating fulfilled medical students in a collaborative culture. We then jumped into interactive sessions on innovation, leadership, meditation, polarity thinking, medical metrics and coaching.

I am a devoted fan of the University of North Carolina men’s basketball team. As an undergraduate student at Carolina, I developed, like many of my peers, a deep hatred for the Duke University men’s basketball team. Known as the “Tobacco Road Rivalry”, athletes, students, and fans around the world have such a strong desire to beat the other team during annual matchups that books and documentaries have been produced on the subject. Regardless of the team’s ability to win, fans cheer for their beloved team, quickly dismissing the talent of the other. 

Much like the Tobacco Road Rivalry, many educators and students share deep favoritism for political parties. In perhaps one of the most heated and controversial presidential elections of our time, just the mention of politics and policy can ignite an untempered passion in many.  As a nursing educator charged with the task of teaching a class on health policy and advocacy the week after the presidential election, I faced a major challenge. I struggled with how I could channel the political energy and passion of my students—regardless of their “team affiliation”—to produce a learning environment where health policy came to life and provided an opportunity for active experimentation and reflection. 

In this blog post Dr. Annie J. Daniel, Director of Veterinary Instructional Design and Outcomes Assessment and Associate Professor of Veterinary Medical Education at Louisiana State University, describes her experience as a visiting professor in Shenzhen, China. She connects her experience to her education of her American students in cultural competency. The post concludes with commentary from the two Chinese teaching assistants who taught with her.

As our Harvard Macy team here in Boston prepares for the Thanksgiving holiday I would like to highlight the gift of community that we all share across many nations, institutions, professions and cultures.  What started in 1994 as a hope and a dream - to create a network of educators and academic leaders committed to innovation and positive learning environments - has now grown to over 5600 HMI alumni at over 500 institutions worldwide.  Our community is contributing to the advancement of healthcare education and delivery in ways that we could never have imagined over 20 years ago.  Each  individual scholar’s passion to make the world a better place, drives the engine of innovation that has become the hallmark of Harvard Macy.   You are all recognized worldwide for your achievements.

In gratitude to each of you this holiday season, I am donating the financial award given to me as the 2016 recipient of the AAMC Abraham Flexner Award for Distinguished Service in Medical Education to start a new scholarship fund for future HMI scholars. My hope is that this fund will allow new scholars from limited-resource settings to join us in the creation of innovative change in health care education.

Dr. Liz Armstrong received the 2016 Association of American Medical Colleges Abraham Flexner Award for Distinguished Service in Seattle on Sunday November 13th. One does not have to go far at AAMC to see the reach of Liz and HMI within the medical education community – and by that I mean I literally cannot walk from one session to the next without running into a Macy colleague eager to share their latest project or innovation.  There are over 4000 health professional educators at the meeting this year in Seattle, and over 5600 HMI alums worldwide. Think about that for a moment – Liz has trained more educators than attend a large annual education meeting for an entire country! As a merry band of HMI alums cheered her on Sunday night, Liz spoke of how the award belonged to all of us. I know I speak for all of you when I say thank you to Liz for her service to the healthcare education community, and congratulations on this much deserved recognition of her work. If you have a personal note of thanks to Liz, please share it by commenting on the blog below!

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 I have just relocated to the Bronx in New York. Originating from the UK I moved from my home in Manchester to London and later to East Asia - Hong Kong and Singapore. At 29 I asked myself what are my true passions within medicine. Apart from my clinical interest in gastroenterology, my second is medical education and my third culture. I find culture fascinating and despite the broadness of the term, in my view it is the basis of why people are who they are and why things are done the way they are. Often we as clinicians may ignore the value of culture in how we deliver care and also in how we teach.

In this video, originally posted on http://www.smacc.net.au, Harvard Macy alum and faculty member Dr. Victoria Brazil speaks about the Imposter Syndrome, the Dunning-Kruger effect, and the role of honest feedback in developing our skills and keeping us humble.

As my eyes adjust from ‘square’ back to ‘round’ after another thrilling week at the Harvard Macy Institute, I reflect on the joy and privilege of working with the talented and extraordinary faculty and scholars of the course. One would be forgiven for thinking that you would leave a program such as this armed with a suite of amazing and increasingly usable tools to dazzle your students and peers, which of course you do, but I kept finding myself focusing my reflections on the spaces between the technology – the people. 

Harvard Macy has created a worldwide community of healthcare educators trained to embrace innovations central to a patient-based paradigm of care.  One cannot spend time as a scholar without realizing personal and professional change in a journey to becoming a change agent for others. In this blog I will describe a number of innovations I have implemented that I learned in the Health Care Education 2.0 course.  The course was transformational for me in so many ways.  I was not simply exposed to #MedEd Technology; I was encouraged to develop a fluency in tools available and challenged to develop more.  

Do you think today’s physicians can be trained in three years instead of four?  There are advocates in both camps.  Opponents would say that to shorten medical education is to shortchange the training necessary for competent physicians.  Supporters would cite the benefits of accelerated pathways, including individualized training, competency based education, the option to reduce escalating student debt and the opportunity to align education to societal needs.  Many accelerated programs, such as FMAT (Family Medicine Accelerated Track) at Texas Tech, focus on training primary care physicians in underserved areas. 

The practice of medicine involves inherent ambiguity. As physicians we seek to provide “best” practice for our patients, setting black-and-white standards in a greyscale space of clinical care. We develop simplified algorithms to aid us in navigating medicine’s complexity and uncertainty—tools that are evaluated in research studies and honed through quality improvement initiatives. With the drive to standardize care comes a challenge for medical education: How can we train physicians to use these evidence-based tools, while being comfortable in the face of uncertainty and thinking critically about how they integrate them into practice?

In 2009, physical therapy (PT) clinical education in Canada reached a pivotal point.  Canadian university entry-to-practice PT educational programs were faced with the challenge where the current assessment form being used to assess student performance in clinical education was not meeting the needs of Canadian educational institutions.  Therefore, we needed to either adopt another measure or develop our own Canadian measure that was reflective of Canadian PT practice.  We decided to develop a new Canadian measure and I seized this incredible opportunity to lead this national initiative.  

Co-authored by: S. Bryn Austin and Holly Gooding

Professional schools have long been leaders in developing teaching cases covering a vast array of topics, from business to policy to medicine to law. The Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health has embraced the case-method teaching model and launched an online library of its collection of public health-focused teaching cases to make them accessible to faculty locally and globally.  Most of these teaching cases are designed for traditional, in-person classroom implementation, but learners and working public health professionals need greater access to curricula designed for online delivery. So how do we take the traditional case-method, designed based on the principles of student-centered active learning, to the online space?

I traveled to my first Harvard Macy Institute leadership course in 2004 as a pathology course director from the Marshall University Joan C. Edwards School of Medicine (JCESOM), a small, community-based medical school located in the heart of rural Appalachia. It was at this time that my life pivoted, redirecting to a mindset that saw opportunities instead of obstacles and dreams bigger than myself.

In my previous blog, I introduced you to the HMS course, “Essentials of the Profession” that integrates social medicine with medical ethics, clinical epidemiology and population health and health policy into a required one-month intensive course for first year students and another one-month required course to be taken sometime during years 3 and 4.  We face a number of dilemmas in the teaching and learning of social medicine; I will highlight three of the most salient ones here.

I am one of those people who believe that there are no coincidences. I had the good fortune of sitting beside Liz Armstrong on a flight from Utah to Boston. I had been dropping off a child at Brigham Young University and Liz was connecting in Salt Lake City. From my conversations with her, I learned about the Harvard Macy courses, which led me to attend Leading Innovations in Health Care and Education, taught by Liz and another dear acquaintance of mine, Clay Christenson.

As a former high school teacher and professional violinist, I’ve always had stories to tell. I’ve always had a lot of “cred” as a clinician educator, and when I speak about teaching, people usually listen because I have an off-the-beaten-track perspective. However, when it came to developing an academic focus and then asking for money to support that focus, my background seemed distant and my ideas lacked clarity. I tried my hand at writing a grant proposal, but it was rejected multiple times. Enter Harvard Macy.

On face-value, the Humanities and healthcare education are at opposite poles.  The Humanities give voice to human beings’ imagination and emotions, and in turn give us space for for self-reflection and self-care. In contrast, healthcare education classically values cognitive and psychomotor learning. In spite of this opposition, as is often the case, opposites do attract.