Background: The hospitalists affiliated with academic institutions typically have professional expectations to serve as clinician-educators. Despite these faculty expectations, few hospitalists have explicit training in how to teach effectively and lack formal experience in developing these skills. There is both a demand and need for sanctioned educational opportunities for academic hospitalists to refine their teaching skills.
Purpose: Our Division of Hospital Medicine is the largest academic hospital medicine program in the nation, situated within a large institution with a diverse compound of urban and suburban clinical sites of practice including but not limited to community hospitals, a public safety-net hospital, university medical centers, and a Department of Veterans Affairs Health Care System hospital. In a collaborative effort to create a forum in education and enhance the teaching skills of our faculty, we designed and executed an educational annual hospitalist teaching competition consisting of succinct, high-yield didactic presentations delivered by an early-career hospitalist from each clinical site. The audience included the members of our division, and it was also open to the trainees of all levels who were interested in attending.
Description: The hospitalist teaching competition has been conducted for the past seven years (excluding 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic). This innovation in medical education has afforded 36 junior faculty members (each with < 5 years of hospitalist experience) the opportunity to showcase their teaching skills and present educational content to a peer group of hospital medicine providers. Initially, the competition was held in person but was later pivoted to the virtual platform to improve attendance and encourage audience engagement. Each annual competition was themed (Things We Do For No Reason™, clinical decision-making scoring systems, etc.) and it was constructed based on a high-value area of interest for hospitalists. Individual topics were randomly assigned. Didactic presentations were budgeted for eight minutes, followed by two minutes of interactive discussions. A diverse panel of judges with expertise in medical education reviewed and scored each presentation for speech clarity, visual appeal, and content quality. The audience for each teaching competition included hospitalist colleagues from all Divisional participating locations, fostering a friendly competitive spirit and collegiality. Audience size has been increasing every year, from 20-30 individuals to over 100 attendees via a virtual platform; This novel educational opportunity has recently grown to include judges and participants from other institutions and the multi-level learners to attend.
Conclusions: There are limited opportunities for junior faculty to prepare and deliver a didactic presentation in a structured, well-designed setting to a larger audience of peers in hospital medicine. An institutional teaching competition within a hospital medicine program provides a forum for faculty development and a fun, safe space for early-career hospitalists to cultivate niche expertise while enhancing their teaching skills. This innovation also provides a valuable opportunity for the attendees to refresh high-value knowledge in core Hospital Medicine topics.