Preceptor: Ideas & Inspiration for Clinical Educators

Preceptor has moved to substack; visit us at Preceptor.substack.com!

In medicine, if you want to have an impact over several years, practice; if you want to have an impact for the next decade, research; but if you want to have an impact for the next century, teach.

We are excited to introduce Preceptor: Ideas & Inspiration for Clinical Educators, an e-newsletter from the Office of Faculty Affairs & Learning Innovation at the Roseman University College of Medicine located in Summerlin, Nevada. The Great Basin region, which includes Nevada and Utah where our institution has campuses, is home to various indigenous groups including Goshute, Newe (Western Shoshone), Numu (Northern Paiute), Nuu-agha-tuvu-pu (Ute), Nuwuvi (Southern Paiute), Shoshone-Bannock, and Shoshone who were the first medical providers in the region, and who now experience disproportionately poor healthcare access and health outcomes. We hope to reconnect providers in the region to the history of the land where they practice, to the needs of the communities they serve, and to each other because we believe community is the cornerstone of health.

Medical education in the broader Mountain West region relies heavily on clinician educators from the community. This newsletter is designed to support community clinical faculty to enhance their skills as educators, to understand emerging trends in medical education, and to integrate the health humanities, including ethics, justice, history, law, and art, into medical practice and clinical teaching. The newsletter is curated, written, and edited by medical educators in the American Mountain West with occasional guest contributions from colleagues farther afield.

Our topics come from contributors who are not only physicians but other professionals and experts whose concern, like ours at Roseman, is for the best (both the scientific and the evaluative sense of the term) experiences and outcomes for patients and their families. We also acknowledge that diagnosticians and therapists practicing medicine need to attend to their own flourishing as professionals and individuals that are very much depleted in the waning of the global pandemic. Provider health and wellbeing is a vital part of the collective ability of the health field to care effectively for patients and to role-model and teach the next generation of health professionals.

Each edition of the newsletter is a single brief (both in the sense of summaries and with the goal of brevity) on Medical Education 101, National Trends in Medical Education, the Science of Learning, Justice in the Clinic, and Art and the Humanities in Medicine, for example, ethics, philosophy, history, literature and poetry, religious studies, theater, cinema, music, dance, visual and expressive arts, culinary arts, architecture, and design.  Our goal is to offer clinical educators tools and concepts to incorporate into clinical teaching and medical practice, from bedside to systems. We aim to nurture and connect clinician-educators who are prepared to provide exceptional clinical education, in all its aspects, to aspiring and ready medical and health professions students, residents, and fellows.

Please share your feedback on this issue and suggestions for topics in future editions. We may be reached by email at OFALI@roseman.edu.