John A. Ullian

What did we learn about the impact on community-based faculty? Recommendations for recruitment, retention, and rewards.

All ten schools participating in the Interdisciplinary Generalist Curriculum (IGC) Project were required to offer students significant generalist longitudinal preceptorship experiences during the first two years of medical school. Each school needed to recruit and then retain many new preceptors to meet the continued large demand. Effective recruitment was usually carried out by established community physicians and/or qualified staff coordinators. Retention of preceptors required establishing regular and succinct communications, quick response to problems, and flexible faculty development programs. For rewards, preceptors primarily requested acknowledgment and appreciation, along with tangible rewards such as decreased fees for continuing medical education and library or e-mail access. Preceptors continue to state that they teach because of the “joys of teaching” even in the current environment with increased demands for productivity. This article describes what has been learned about recruitment, retention, and rewards for community preceptors and how to maximize the positive impacts and minimize the negative impacts of teaching for community preceptors.

Augmented standardized patients now virtually a reality

Standardized patients (SPs), individuals who realistically portray patients, are widely used in medical education to teach and assess communication skills, eliciting a history, performing a physical exam, and other important clinical skills. One limitation is that each SP can only portray a limited set of physical symptoms. Finding SPs with the abnormalities students need to encounter is typically not feasible. This project augments the SP by permitting the learner to hear abnormal heart and lung sounds in a normal SP.