Enhancing Clinical Teaching in Critical Thinking, High-Value Care, and Health Care Equity

Area of Science:

• Medical Education
• Clinical Pedagogy
• Healthcare Professional Development

Background:

• Implementing and assessing faculty development in clinical settings presents significant challenges.
• Effective bedside teaching is crucial for medical education but often lacks structured content.
• Key areas like critical thinking (CT), high-value care (HVC), and health care equity (HCE) require focused integration into clinical teaching.

Purpose of the Study:

• To evaluate a faculty development intervention designed to enhance bedside teaching.
• To assess the intervention's impact on teaching critical thinking (CT), high-value care (HVC), and health care equity (HCE).
• To compare teaching behaviors between an intervention group (IG), a comparison group (CG), and working group (WG) participants.

Main Methods:

• The intervention was informed by the Communities of Practice model and Theoretical Domains Framework.
• Three multidepartmental working groups developed and delivered 2-hour sessions over three months.
• Faculty satisfaction, knowledge acquisition, and behavior change were evaluated using surveys and direct observation of teaching during patient care.

Main Results:

• Eighty-seven faculty members participated; 68 were observed for an average of 5.2 hours each.
• Statistically significant increases in teaching counts per hour were observed post-intervention across all groups (P < .001).
• Working group faculty demonstrated the highest teaching counts for CT (8.2/hr), HVC (1.6/hr), and HCE (1.4/hr) compared to IG and CG.

Conclusions:

• The faculty development intervention successfully increased the frequency of teaching CT, HVC, and HCE in the clinical setting.
• Working group faculty established benchmarks for future faculty development interventions in clinical teaching.
• The project created sustainable teaching materials and trained faculty, laying the groundwork for integrating essential content into clinical education.