Harvard Macy Institute Podcast

The Harvard Macy Institute Podcast S3 E2: Just in Time Simulation for High Stakes Communication

The Harvard Macy Institute Podcast aims to connect our Harvard Macy Institute community and to develop our interest in health professions education topics and literature. Our podcast is hosted by our Program for Educators in the Health Professions course faculty Victoria Brazil, and will feature interviews with health professions education authors and their research papers.

This episode of the Harvard Macy Institute podcast is a joint release with Simulcast, and we spoke with Laura Rock – a critical care physician about using ‘just in time’ simulation for high stakes communication with patients and families.

Practising communication, with good feedback, helps us get better at our jobs in healthcare. This is especially important for ‘high stakes communication’ (but really is there any other kind 😊). In this episode of the HMI podcast, Vic speaks with Laura Rock about her recent paper: Communication as a High-Stakes Clinical Skill: "Just-in-Time" Simulation and Vicarious Observational Learning to Promote Patient- and Family-Centered Care and to Improve Trainee Skill.

Her key messages are about the power of rehearsal with feedback for better communication, and the need to practice the actual words we will use. We highlight that this approach appropriately elevates the status of communication as a critical skill, along with other procedural skills. Laura describes strategies like the use of scripts, and developing the ‘microskills’ of communication, as well as recognising the fundamental role of recognizing and responding to emotions in both patients and learners.

Laura is a pulmonologist and critical care doctor who works in the intensive care unit at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Centre in Boston, USA, affiliated with Harvard Medical School. She has a particular interest in communication and teamwork – which she teaches at her own institution and with the Boston based Center for Medical Simulation.

 

The Harvard Macy Institute Podcast S3 E1: Connecting Scholarship to Practice in Health Professions Education with Lara Varpio and Subha Ramani

The Harvard Macy Institute Podcast aims to connect our Harvard Macy Institute community and to develop our interest in health professions education topics and literature. Our podcast is hosted by our Program for Educators in the Health Professions course faculty Victoria Brazil, and will feature interviews with health professions education authors and their research papers.

S3 E1 Podcast features Subha Ramani and Lara Varpio having a conversation about scholarship in health professions education, and how to make this academic work accessible and applicable for educators.

Scholarship in health professions education is often based on paradigms and methodologies unfamiliar to clinician educators. This risks a ‘disconnect’ – where educators may be looking for randomized controlled trials, and scholars are providing theoretical frameworks and thematic analysis!

 

In this episode Lara Varpio and Subha Ramani discuss their scholarly work in health professions education and how they have made that work rigorous and useful to practitioners, while also educating their readers and challenging some positivist norms.

Lara Varpio is Professor, Center for Health Professions Education & Department of Medicine and Associate Director of Research, Center for Health Professions Education at the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences in Maryland. Subha Ramani is Associate Professor of Medicine, Harvard Medical School, and an internal medicine physician at the Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston. She is senior faculty with the Harvard Macy Institute.

We had an interesting discussion on the cultural contexts in which this scholarship is placed and look forward to more ‘bidirectional’ influence of non-Western perspectives on knowledge and ‘ways of knowing.’ Subha and Lara provided excellent advice to those early in their scholarship journey – being clear on goals, engaging in scholarship for the right reasons and the importance of collaboration. Many thanks to them for their time and expertise!

 

Watch out for new episodes this year which will be announced on our blog and our Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook social media channels.

 

Did you know that the Harvard Macy Institute Community Blog has had more than 285 posts? Previous blog posts have explored topics including developing leaders for healthcare and education, leading curricular change, and systems of assessment in educational settings.

 

Author BIO

Victoria Brazil, MD (Educators, ’05, Leaders ’07, Assessment ‘10) is Professor of Emergency Medicine and Director of Simulation at Bond University Faculty of Health Sciences and Medicine. Her research interests include podcasting and simulation, and she is co-producer of Simulcast - a podcast about healthcare simulation. Victoria can be followed on Twitter.

The Harvard Macy Institute Podcast S2 E11: New Horizons in Healthcare and Implications for Health Professions Education

The Harvard Macy Institute Podcast aims to connect our Harvard Macy Institute community and to develop our interest in health professions education topics and literature. Our podcast is hosted by our Program for Educators in the Health Professions course faculty Victoria Brazil, and will feature interviews with health professions education authors and their research papers.

In this episode of the Harvard Macy Institute podcast, we spoke with Ann Somers Hogg about the top trends to watch in healthcare delivery, and what this might mean for health professions education. 

Health professions educators must remain attuned to the ways in which healthcare is delivered if we want to produce graduates who are ‘work ready.’ This is an enormous challenge when healthcare technology and systems evolve at a rapid rate.

So, what is on the horizon of health delivery? What changes in practice can we anticipate? What will be the impact of technology? Changing workforce roles? changing consumer expectations? And how will COVID-19 continue to influence care delivery?

In this episode of the Harvard Macy Institute podcast, we spoke with Ann Somers Hogg about the top trends to watch in healthcare delivery. Ann-Somers is a senior research fellow at the Christensen Institute where she focuses on business model innovation and disruption in healthcare, including how we can transform a sick care system to one that values and incentivizes total health. Prior to joining the Institute, Ann Somers spent eight years at Atrium Health.

We talked about technology, personalised medicine, ‘health coaches,’ mental health apps, companies that are ’healthcare aggregators,’ telehealth trends and exemplars such as the Health Design lab at Jefferson Health. We conjectured about what this all means for health professions education and look forward to more of these conversations.

Watch out for new episodes this year which will be announced on our blog and our Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook social media channels.

 

Did you know that the Harvard Macy Institute Community Blog has had more than 290 posts? Previous blog posts have explored topics including developing leaders for healthcare and education, leading curricular change, and systems of assessment in educational settings.

 

The Harvard Macy Institute Podcast S2 E10: Trends and Disruptions in Teaching Perspectives with Dan Pratt and Amanda Dumoulin

The Harvard Macy Institute Podcast aims to connect our Harvard Macy Institute community and to develop our interest in health professions education topics and literature. Our podcast is hosted by our Program for Educators in the Health Professions course faculty Victoria Brazil, and features interviews with health professions educators about their scholarly work.

 

In this S2 E10 podcast, Vic Brazil spoke with Dan Pratt - Professor Emeritus in the Faculty of Education and Senior Scholar in the Faculty of Medicine at the University of British Columbia, Canada - and Amanda Dumoulin, a recent BA Psychology Honors graduate student from Kwantlen Polytechnic University.

In his book Five Perspectives on Teaching, Dan Pratt describes perspectives as ‘something we look through, rather than at as we go about the business of teaching. He eschews the idea of simplistic ‘best practices,’ and invites a ‘plurality of the good’ in teaching - recognizing our perspectives and thoughtful about how they shape our teaching formats.

Do these perspectives change over time? Are the influences on them internal or external? What is the effect of a massive disruption such as the COVID-19 pandemic?

Dan gave us a precis of the five perspectives and the Teaching Perspectives Inventory - a freely available instrument for educators to help identify their dominant and back up perspectives. In reviewing data from Harvard Macy Institute Scholars, Amanda offered some insights into trends observed over time, and some dramatic shifts during the pandemic. After some initial shifts towards a transmission perspective, developmental and nurturing perspectives are on the rise again. Food for thought! We reflected on the role of technology and culture in shaping teachers’ perspectives and practice.

 

Happy listening!

The Harvard Macy Institute Podcast S2E9: “Glocalisation” for health professions education

The Harvard Macy Institute Podcast aims to connect our Harvard Macy Institute community and to develop our interest in health professions education topics and literature. Our podcast is hosted by our Program for Educators in the Health Professions course faculty Victoria Brazil, and will feature interviews with health professions education authors and their research papers.

Podcast S2E9 features Sawsan Abdel-Rawsig, in a discussion about ‘glocalisation’ – how we adapt our increasingly global approaches in health professions education to ensure they remain culturally and locally aligned        

Healthcare and health professions education is increasingly global and interconnected. This has many benefits, but risks ignoring important cultural and contextual differences in the settings where education is delivered. In this episode Sawsan Abdel Rawsig tells us about ‘glocalisation’ - combining the terms globalisation and localization to describe the adaptation of international standards to local needs and cultures. We explored this concept through her work in the United Arab Emirates, where she works as chair of medical education at the Cleveland Clinic Abu Dhabi.

Glocalisation involves adapting the domains of learning, the pedagogies, the faculty, and the systems to those that align with and serve local communities. By way of example, Sawsan has led the creation of a framework for medical professionalism in the UAE, with considerable overlap with accepted Western definitions, along with important differences.

We also discussed the opportunities for the ‘bidirectional’ influence of cultural adaptation, and suggest that the process of reflecting on differences can positively reshape some of our dominant Western perspectives.

The Harvard Macy Institute Podcast S2 E8: A Curious Case of the Phantom Professor with with Bas Uijtdehaage and Lauren Germain

The Harvard Macy Institute Podcast aims to connect our Harvard Macy Institute community and to develop our interest in health professions education topics and literature. Our podcast is hosted by our Program for Educators in the Health Professions course faculty Victoria Brazil, and features interviews with health professions educators about their scholarly work.

S2 E8 podcast is a conversation between Vic Brazil, Sebastian (Bas) Uijtdehaage, and Lauren Germain about why student evaluations of teaching (SETs) can appear ‘mindless,’ and about the inadequacies of many student evaluation systems in educational institutions.

We use a humorous but sobering article as our departure point for the conversation - A curious case of the phantom professor: mindless teaching evaluations by medical students. Bas gives us the background to the article, and we reflect on “three risk factors that may encourage ‘mindless’ evaluation practices: (i) the cognitively taxing nature of SETs; (ii) the lack of perceived impact of SETs on the curriculum, and (iii) the degree to which the evaluation task is experienced as just another routine ‘chore’.”

This challenge is compounded by a lack of reliability in SETs, poor correlation between student evaluation and learning outcomes, recent work confirming gender, racial/ethnic, and attractiveness , and the paradox of using desirable difficulties in teaching and improving learning outcomes.

But it is not all doom and gloom! Lauren and Bas offer us alternative approaches to SETs – including more authentic engagement with students, ‘prediction based’ methods, qualitative approaches such as focus groups and dialogue based evaluation, and peer observation of teaching.

Lovely wisdom from two thoughtful leaders in the field of assessment and evaluation, and closely aligned with the principles underpinning the Harvard Macy Institute Systems Approach to Assessment in Health Professions Education.

 

Happy listening!

 

The Harvard Macy Institute Podcast S2 E7: Welcoming new scholars into the Harvard Macy Community of Practice.

The Harvard Macy Institute Podcast is hosted by our Program for Educators in the Health Professions course faculty Victoria Brazil. This episode features a conversation with Program for Educators course directors Liz Armstrong and Holly Gooding and program manager Todd Fowler, in a discussion welcoming new course scholars into our worldwide community of practice.

Why did Liz Armstrong create the Harvard Macy Program for Educators in the Health Professions? What should new scholars expect from this immersive experience? How can scholars and faculty best prepare for the week? And why does Todd Fowler have so many bow ties? New scholars, returning faculty scholars, and alumni alike will enjoy this chat with HMI founder Liz Armstrong, Program for Educators course co-director Holly Gooding, and the man who keeps it all running, Todd Fowler. Take a listen to learn more about the history of the Harvard Macy Institute, the types of groups scholars will experience as they join our community of practice, and “tips from Todd” for getting the most out of the week.

The Harvard Macy Institute Podcast S2 E6: Digital presence with Traci Wolbrink

The Harvard Macy Institute Podcast aims to connect our Harvard Macy Institute community and to develop our interest in health professions education topics and literature. Our podcast is hosted by our Program for Educators in the Health Professions course faculty Victoria Brazil, and features interviews with health professions educators about their scholarly work.

S2 S6 podcast is a conversation between Vic Brazil and Traci Wolbrink about ‘digital presence’ – how to establish and manage our online identities, including the overlap of personal and professional identities. It’s a fun ‘meta’ experience – a podcast recorded ‘live’ during the 2021 HMI Transforming Teaching for the Virtual Environment course.

We all have a digital presence – an online identity shaped by how we appear on institutional websites, social media and personal postings. How we curate and manage that presence is important for our careers and our work.

This episode of the podcast was recorded during the Transforming your Teaching for the Virtual Environment (TTVE) course in April 2021. Vic spoke with Traci Wolbrink about her work with Open Pediatrics – and how carefully the team there manage their digital content creation, adaptation for various audiences and hosting platforms, and conversations on social media.

We then flipped the conversation and Traci reflected on Vic’s approach to podcasting, and how to have engaging online conversations with guests that listeners will enjoy, with some thoughts about how that applies to our interactive online teaching.

The dominant themes in the conversation were audience and listening – not always what comes to mind when we consider online activity :-).

The Harvard Macy Institute Podcast S2 E5: Artificial Intelligence for Health Professions Education

The Harvard Macy Institute Podcast aims to connect our Harvard Macy Institute community and to develop our interest in health professions education topics and literature. Our podcast is hosted by our Program for Educators in the Health Professions course faculty Victoria Brazil, and will feature interviews with health professions education authors and their research papers.

 

Podcast #14 features HMI faculty member Martin Pusic, in a discussion about artificial intelligence (AI), big data, analytics and algorithms – and how they might transform healthcare and health professions education        

The Harvard Macy Institute Podcast Season 2 Episode 4: Developing Leaders for Healthcare and Education

The Harvard Macy Institute Podcast aims to connect our Harvard Macy Institute community and to develop our interest in health professions education topics and literature. Our podcast is hosted by our Program for Educators in the Health Professions course faculty Victoria Brazil, and will feature interviews with health professions education authors and their research papers.

Season 2, Episode 4 features Harvard Macy Institute Leading Innovations in Health Care and Education course directors Liz Armstrong, Derek van Bever and Josh Nagler, together with 2020 scholars Tanya Holt and Tanya Horsley, reflection on the why, what and how of developing leaders for 21^st century education and healthcare.           

We are experiencing rapid and fundamental change in the ways healthcare and health professions education are delivered, and in the social, political, and financial environment in which they exist. In this podcast, Victoria Brazil speaks with Josh Nagler about the need for leadership during times of change, and the ways we can develop leaders from across the career spectrum. We draw on the wisdom of HMI Leading Innovations in Healthcare and Education co-directors Derek van Bever and Liz Armstrong in reflecting on the critical need for innovation and change in healthcare, the translational of leadership theory to practice, and the use of case studies in leadership development. They emphasize the importance of creating a psychologically safe environment where learners can take risks as critical leadership development steps, and describe how the theory of disruptive innovation continues to shape their approach to guiding others to lead change.

The podcast also features the voices of two scholars from the 2020 Leading Innovations in Health Care and Education program – Tanya Horsley and Tanya Holt – who describe this developmental process from a scholars viewpoint, and their experience of becoming part of a community of practice within the Harvard Macy Institute.

Watch out for new episodes this year which will be announced on our blog and our Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook social media channels.

 

Author BIO

Victoria Brazil, MD (Educators, ’05, Leaders ’07, Assessment ‘10) is Professor of Emergency Medicine and Director of Simulation at Bond University Faculty of Health Sciences and Medicine. Her research interests include podcasting and simulation, and she is co-producer of Simulcast - a podcast about healthcare simulation. Victoria can be followed on Twitter.