Teacher! teach thyself !!

“Please keep track of this patient – let me know what this turns out to be” is my common refrain to anyone who seeks an opinion on a difficult case.

We all follow-up our patients; we need to know. We need to know if we were right in making a diagnosis; we need to know the final outcome of a procedure or surgery, we need to know how well a patient came off a complication; we need to know because we need to learn to publish and to share our experiences with our colleagues all our the world .

Following- up patients, getting their feedback, knowing if we did right or wrong; knowing how we fared seems to be a done thing – after all, we are doctors, we need to get better all the time.

Sure we are doctors; but are we just doctors? I thought we were medical teachers too – after all - my appointment letter says “Full time Professor in Radiology”. So teaching, is supposed to be an integral part of our workday. It is not an “optional extra”…. we are doing no one any favour by teaching We are paid to teach and we need to do it well. After all GS is still the first choice of most toppers.

Assuming that we do all the teaching we need to do; do we know if we teach well? What do the kids think of our teaching? Have we gone around asking them ‘Tell us how we rate”. Today’s students are bold and forthright in giving feed back and we can benefit immensely from this - if only we do it right.

“If only we do it right” – that seems to be the key.. From my informal chat with UGs, I have realized that there is great scope for improvement in both the program and quality of teaching.

“We can count good teachers in GS on the fingers of two hands and great teachers do not even count for all the fingers on our one hand” a gutsy young lady from final MBBS said. Take for example the “integrated teaching” that we do for them. It seems to be a disaster because the timing of the lectures and the kids’ “knowledge level“ is all wrong. In fact, SVP has written up about this in one of his articles on this forum.

But how do we get this feed back – back to the teachers; how do we get them to accept the “testing time” - to accept the results and work on improving themselves. Unfortunately, neither the MET cell nor the Academic committee has been able to put in place a self propagating system of student’s feedback in spite of the fact that we have capable people in the campus in the MET cell, in the academic committee and of course the FAIMER itself.. I suspect that this is so, because we are afraid of a backlash from teachers who may feel hurt and let down on feedback that may be critical. We worry about chaos.

Some time ago, I was discussing this issue with a non-medical friend of mine who has been a career teacher and she had suggested several ways to improving acceptability of critical feedback by teachers. I do not believe much of that has being implemented in our college though our local experts in teaching research may all be aware of these.

Whatever be the truth, I am certain we need to intervene urgently if we are to prevent GS from sliding into double digits in Medical school rankings.

And should that happen, we will have no else but ourselves to blame.

ANS, Nimma, Pritha – are you listening?

January 2009.