Doctors working in KU School of Medicine-Wichita programs see patients and teach and work closely with students and residents who will care for the coming generations of patients. But something they don’t often get to do is immerse themselves in the science of teaching and learn what medical school colleagues across the country are doing to enhance curriculum and learning environments.

With financial support from the Department of Faculty Affairs & Development at KU School of Medicine-Wichita, three faculty members recently traveled to a national conference Feb. 13-15 to gain more of that knowledge and perspective. Two attendees, Cindy Daugherty, M.D., and Serina Padilla, M.D., are clinical pediatrics faculty. The third, Tara Neil, M.D., is associate director of the KU-sponsored Via Christi Family Medicine Residency.

The conference, Developing Medical Educators of the 21st Century, is sponsored by the University of California, San Francisco School of Medicine. Each annual UCSF conference has themes and this year’s focuses were on creating inclusive and equitable learning environments, fostering effective lifelong learners and ensuring well-being of both students and faculty.

Daugherty, division director of ambulatory pediatrics and a clinical associate professor, works with first- and third-year medical students on elective and required rotations and supervises residents in the pediatrics clinic.

“I have been a pediatrician for 27 years but only teaching for eight,” Daugherty said. “I feel like anything that enhances my teaching is beneficial.”

Building skills and networks

Each year, Faculty Affairs sets aside money to send faculty to the conference, paying for fees, travel, lodging and meals.

“The UCSF conference is a great opportunity for faculty to expand their networks and meet other leading medical educators,” said Julie Galliart, Ed.D., associate dean of faculty affairs and development. “This is a good opportunity to connect with people who are publishing medical education scholarship and developing new approaches.”

Padilla is a clinical assistant professor and an assistant director of the Jager Learning Society, where she facilitates problem-based learning for first- and second-year medical students.

“We don't necessarily get formal training, so I'm always looking for ways to improve my approach to teaching residents and students,” Padilla said. “And we need to understand topics like diversity and inclusion.”

The support of Faculty Affairs was important. “I had been to another conference and used up a portion of my continuing education money,” Padilla said. “The fact that they paid for us to go there, and for the hotel stay, was wonderful.”

“While we try to provide in-house opportunities for faculty to develop teaching and medical education scholarship skills,” Galliart said, “faculty always come back from this conference with new ideas and fresh perspectives that enhance our local offerings.”

What they took away

The three-day conference was packed with everybody-attends sessions, small group breakouts and workshops. Although kept busy, the doctors were able to play tourist a bit. They rode a cable car, visited Fisherman’s Wharf and took a boat tour of San Francisco Bay. Neil connected with a medical school friend, too.

The three doctors found the conference highly interactive, with valuable small group conversations and the opportunity to gain concrete ideas and solutions from other physicians and schools. “It was designed to learn from each other, a great structure,” Neil said.

They found many sessions helpful but one that stood out involves applying an “anti-deficit framework.”

At times, educators wonder why a student or resident isn’t getting a concept or is failing to thrive. Underrepresented groups — by race, gender, orientation, income, learning style or other factors — at medical schools and elsewhere have had performance issues written off, consciously or unconsciously, as a factor of who they are or where they are from.

With medical schools seeking to have their classes reflect the diverse patients they’ll treat, the framework encourages turning the inclination to blame on its head. It’s the mindset that “there’s nothing wrong with the learner, but that we haven't made the right accommodation,” Daugherty said. “We heard from underrepresented groups, and how accommodations were so helpful to them.”

“It’s a way to reframe your approach of questioning why a certain group may not be applying or be successful in medical school,” Padilla said. “It’s about asking what we could do to make this person successful.”

“It made me reflect on situations I’ve been in in the past,” Neil said. “I’ll now consider the difficulties in the system preventing students or residents from learning or providing care.”

Neil found a session on assessment eye-opening, including how to create assessment tools that don’t include bias. Another session on patient advocacy, geared toward medical students, also struck a chord.

“It involved encouraging learners to get better information about where a patient is coming from,” Neil said. “The template they shared included talking about transportation, access to prescriptions and the ease of getting in to see their primary care doctor.”

“Speed and accuracy are often rewarded over patient advocacy and that dovetails into evaluation,” Neil said. “If we have bilingual learners who are not as timely, it might be because they are being patient advocates and helping.”

Neil plans to incorporate some of the patient advocacy discussion into curriculum, along with looking at her residency program’s recruitment process, to “further crystallize what we are looking for.”

“I plan to share the information with people that I work with,” Padilla said. “And some of these people deal with portions of the curriculum or the residency where they might be able to implement changes.”

“There was a lot of talk on changing how we rank our students or residents so that we can get a good diverse group,” she said. “Everybody wants the top-scoring students but, really, you should want those who are a good fit. Because you can make them the best if they're a good fit for your program.”