During medical school, I spent hours scribing lectures, paragraphs from text books, and tutorial notes. Writing repetitively. Scraping to learn and retain every fact my brain could hold. Oh, how I wish I had known about visual note taking back then.

I discovered this form of learning support, also known as sketch-noting or info-doodling, about two years ago. During a meeting, I watched my Department Head scribble and scrawl all over a page. The upshot was a hut on an island and an isolated palm tree, which did not mean much to me, but for him it represented the essence of what was being discussed. I asked what he was doing. He told me about sketch-noting and pointed me in the direction of a couple of well-known authors in the field.

Our domestic and global health delivery systems face significant challenges to providing all of our patients with quality health care. Medical education plays an important role in improving health equity. The Cambridge Health Alliance Internal Residency program has developed a required social medicine and research based health advocacy course to address a gap in medical training. The program believes that physician advocacy is a central tenet of medical professionalism.

Interprofessional education (IPE) is a hot topic right now, but building collaborations can be challenging. Let’s face it, it’s especially challenging in an academic model where each professional school has its own priorities, funding structures, and schedules. Faculty who have a passion for building IPE are aware of these challenges but will also quickly tell you how rewarding addressing these challenges can be! Simply put, designing IPE will be one of the most exhausting, rewarding, and all-consuming innovations you can do as an educator. In this blog, I will share one strategy of involving students in the development of an IPE population health course. 

HMI: Dr. Rose, please tell us why you selected the topic of Health Disparities, Diversity, and Inclusion for your new book?                                   

Dr. Rose: As a young graduate student at Yale University pursuing a master of public health degree in the mid-1980s, I stumbled upon a topic that I was unfamiliar with— namely, health disparities in terms of race and ethnicity. I was taking a number of core courses, and within most there was mention of a gap between the health statuses of Black and White people in the United States. I reflected upon this issue and decided it would be a key area of interest for me, and indeed it has been to this day.

One of my mentors in medical school in Egypt had a coffee mug that reads “To teach is to touch lives forever”. That was a couple of decades ago but I still remember it vividly. I think overall I have been thought of as a “good teacher” by students, peers and course directors but until recently I personally had no clue what “good teacher” really meant.

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.