At home I’m sometimes jokingly called an absent-minded professor, if only because of the papers on and next to my desk. However, I cannot call myself absent-minded. In fact, I like order. Order in the chaos of the so often busy life. That is difficult, especially if you work in a hospital. A place where you often don’t know exactly what your day will look like.
I’m not the only one for whom ‘how the day goes’ is largely determined. This certainly also applies to the interns who accompany me. They often start with a plan for their day. For example, they may have resolved to take care of a specific patient during the visit, or to view a patient’s examination. But during the day it may turn out that the first patient is suddenly seriously ill in bed, the other has been called away early for the examination, and yet another has failed or refused to prepare for the examination.
Although I have a passion for training and research into education, in practice I find out that I find it difficult to supervise interns in this form of chaos. Keeping ‘order in the chaos’ still costs me energy, even as a physician assistant. At the same time, such situations are also learning moments. I recently skipped a symposium with leading researchers at our annual international conference on medical education. Instead, I opted for a workshop on training offered by top clinicians while you are still being trained.
I took home some great tips. That naming everything I see, hear and do with a seriously ill patient is instructive for interns. That with a patient at bedside I have to ensure that the implicit becomes explicit. That if the intern cannot watch one study, there will always be another that will succeed. Not so planned, but then they too learn how things can turn out differently.
The workshop’s final message predicted that my choice for this turn was the right one: “Good learners make good teachers“. On to an instructive academic year!
Stephanie Meeuwissen, assistant physician Internal Medicine at MUMC+ and researcher at the School of Health Professions Education