Where do you find your educational drive?
In my daily work as a geriatrician, I see how our society is changing. Patients are getting older and older and increasingly suffer from multiple conditions at the same time, while medical science is becoming increasingly capable. As a result, we are seeing healthcare needs become increasingly complex. As a healthcare professional, how do you ensure that all of a patient's problems are identified, that the proposed treatment fits in with the overall package and, more importantly, fits in with the patient's wishes and goals? For older people, this does not always mean treatment aimed at prolonging life, but sometimes choosing options that maintain quality of life. In my daily practice, I see how young healthcare professionals in training struggle with the complexity of caring for these older people. As a result, I sometimes see them trying to deny or avoid complexity. I therefore find my challenge and desire to teach in showing these young healthcare professionals how wonderful it is to work with this group, to show them how to address this complexity with courage and curiosity, and how to derive satisfaction from discussions about quality of life with elderly people in fragile health.
Which moment has always stayed with you?
As a young professional, I still learn a lot from role models from my own education. One moment from my medical training was a lecture by Bas Bloem, a neurologist at Radboudumc. We were learning about neurological disorders, and his area of expertise was mentioned. A fellow student asked if he could tell us more about walking disorders, and I saw a kind of childlike enthusiasm light up in his eyes. This was followed by half an hour in which he imitated various walking disorders associated with different neurological conditions, causing the students to forget for a moment: 'Will this be on the test?
In my own teaching practice, I am mainly active in workplace education, where I use “Rich Pictures”, among other things, to stimulate discussion about transmural cooperation (between general practitioners and hospital specialists). In this context, medical assistants draw pictures of real-life situations that serve as a conversation tool during the teaching process. In one of the sessions, I asked the medical assistants to draw what is important to a patient in transmural collaboration. However, when discussing the drawings, we came to the conclusion that there were no patients in the drawings, but mainly pills, diagnoses and doctors. We jointly concluded that we do not really know what patients expect or want from transmural collaboration and often “assume” that there is collaboration between different doctors. From practice, we know that this is unfortunately not always the case. From that moment on, we became more conscious of discussing collaboration in our clinical work and wanted to involve patients more in this.
What do you hope your students take away from your education?
How interesting and complex it is to work with elderly people and the various members of their treatment team. That complexity is not scary, but requires attention, courage and curiosity. Another thing I recognise from my own training is that learners in the workplace can be very preoccupied with “I should already be able to do and know everything”. In practice, I therefore hope to give professionals in training the space to learn and develop, rather than focusing primarily on performing their work efficiently.
What was your biggest learning moment as a teacher?
What I am currently developing is how to translate my personal vision, interpretation of literature and practical experience into quality requirements, learning objectives and the curriculum. How do you strike a good balance between your own experiences and sufficiently aligning with other parts of the curriculum and the final attainment levels?
What is something that you still want to try in your education?
I recently heard from a colleague who is training to be a general practitioner that she had received training on how to write good AI prompts. I think it would be great to try this on a small scale with medical assistants in our department.