This month, the IAMSE Publications Committee review is taken from the article titled The Academic Medicine and Leadership Track for Medical Students, published in Medical Science Educator (13 December 2023) by Kelli Glaser, Matthew McEchron, Clyde Jensen, and David Park.
Medical schools are constantly working to improve and enhance their curricula to ensure that their students become competent physicians. However, today’s physicians also need to be excellent leaders and educators. Unfortunately, not many schools offer enough opportunities within their curricula to develop the skill sets and competencies necessary to become effective leaders and educators.
In this short communication, the authors have shared an approach to offer training on education and leadership to medical students they adopted at Rocky Vista University by introducing an ‘Academic Medicine and Leadership’ track. This voluntary track has limited seats at their school and includes two semester-long courses. These courses offer training on a wide range of topics, including but not limited to curriculum design, research design, leadership styles, accreditation, strategic planning, budgets, etc. The detailed list has been provided by the authors along with the learning modalities they use for providing this training. Additionally, the authors have expanded on a couple of activities/projects conducted under this track, such as the Young Doctors Program, which has components of service, outreach, and health care education.
Finally, the authors have shared some initial outcome data on this track in terms of student engagement and participation in various activities. The authors also report that the student feedback on certain aspects, such as active learning, etc., has been encouraging. Overall, this approach seems promising for other medical schools interested in adopting a similar track. Additional exploration and investigation in this area may help the wider medical education community successfully integrate leadership and academic medicine into the curricula.
Aditi Kesari, MBBS, PhD
Assistant Dean, Curriculum Integration
Assistant Professor, Department of Medical Education
College of Medicine
University of Tennessee Health Science Center