Ask the expert: How can the faculty members on our medical staff fit in adequate teaching time with the new resident duty-hour restrictions?

Finding time to teach residents at the bedside is difficult. With new resident duty hour rules taking effect later this year, there will be even fewer opportunities for faculty to teach. Faculty members will have to make the most of the little time they have to educate residents. 

Enter the “speed-dating” approach to faculty development, created by Robin Dibner, MD, associate chair and program director of the internal medicine program at Lenox Hill Hospital in New York City; Erica Friedman, MD, associate dean of education assessment and scholarship at Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York City; and colleagues from several other nearby hospitals.

Using this approach, workshop participants rotate through three case scenarios in which the faculty play the roles of teacher, learner, and observer to improve their skills in teaching and evaluating learners. As participants rotating through different roles and scenarios in less than two hours, the event is similar to speed dating.

The workshop focuses on techniques, such as the one-minute preceptor, that don’t take attending physicians a great deal of time to incorporate into their routines, says Friedman.

“We wanted to make it as easy as possible for people to do this so they don’t feel burdened,” she says. “[Teaching] is always going to add time. But the value of it is helping someone become a better physician.”

Dibner says the workshop can work for any residency program, so you can reproduce it to help your faculty members become more skilled at evaluating learners.

To learn more, read “Faculty speed dating: A teaching and evaluation faculty development workshop to fall in love with” in the February issue of Residency Program Alert.