Academic medicine : journal of the Association of American Medical Colleges
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Many physicians believe that the tasks of postgraduate medical education and faculty development are best carried out by senior physicians trained in the appropriate specialty. However, many also will admit that, as physicians, they have received too little training for such an educational role, and that the practical demands of medical practice, scientific research, and administration make it difficult if not impossible to allocate time to continuing medical education program development, curriculum design for residency training, teacher training, and other key aspects of postgraduate medical education. ⋯ Such consultants in postgraduate medical education and training programs in anesthesiology could perform a wide variety of functions and roles because they possess skills and technical expertise in teaching, training, curriculum design, evaluation, program planning, and interpersonal communications that faculty members often lack. The successful use of a nonphysician consultant in the Department of Anesthesiology at Hahnemann University in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, is described.
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To determine whether control of work hours (controllable lifestyle) was becoming an increasingly important factor in choices of specialties by medical students, data from three medical schools over the past ten, ten, and six years, respectively, were reviewed for the types of specialty training entered by students in the top 15% of their classes. Since students in the upper 15% of the class are likely to obtain the specialties of their choice, any change in the pattern of their specialty preferences probably reflects a general trend. ⋯ Non-CL specialties were surgery, medicine, family practice, pediatrics, and obstetrics-gynecology. The results showed that the percentages of students entering CL specialties increased significantly at all three schools, the percentages of students entering non-CL specialties decreased significantly at all three schools, and there was no significant change in the percentage of students entering surgical specialties.