Chapter 14 Medical Education

Medical students come to the field with a range of pre-existing competencies, attitudes, cultural assumptions, privilege and values. Medical educators must teach, train, supervise and assess, but they may also hold other roles simultaneously, acting as managers, employers and senior colleagues. Because of the breadth of workplace-based learning required in medicine, most doctors teach, beginning when they are in quite junior roles. Almost invariably, clinicians take on these roles without any training or experience in management, education, or assessment. Medical educators also facilitate professional identity formation, acting as mentors and role models. Some of these roles may be difficult to integrate, because they have contradictory goals and require different pedagogy. The situation is made more complex by the increasing role of interprofessional learning across the variety of clinical disciplines and professions present in the health care workplace. In this chapter, we examine several core responsibilities of medical educators in the field of professionalism. First, medical educators are responsible for teaching and assessing professional conduct, and where possible, remediating poor performance. They are also responsible for selecting suitable medical students, and graduating doctors who demonstrate appropriate professional conduct. Finally, medical educators lead educational teams, managing the multiple roles of supervising, teaching, assessing and managing learners, and in doing so, they create, sustain and manage the hierarchies in which sexual harassment often occurs.