Jack of All Trades, Masters of One?

“Ladies and gentlemen, this is your captain speaking. Actually I’m not a pilot; I’m an ER doctor. But in my lifetime I’ve been on over 200 flights, so I think I have a good idea of how the process works. I really love planes, and I’ve always thought it would be fun to fly one. In fact, one of my best friends is a pilot, and I’ve spent a lot of time in airports, and my grandfather was in the Air Force. So I think we should be just fine. Please sit back, enjoy the flight, and we’ll see you in Atlanta.” No passenger in their right mind would stay on that plane. And hopefully no emergency physician in their right mind would ever say such a thing from the cockpit. And yet, we do much the same thing (albeit with less immediate risk) when we take on roles for which our only training is, essentially, that we really like planes and we’ve spent a lot of time in airports. Being emergency physicians prepares us for many things – but our skills may not translate directly into other realms. In particular, our training and experience as clinicians may only partially prepare us to be educators. The era of “see one, do one, teach one” is as problematic when training education leaders as it is to training in clinical skills. Learning to teach emergency medicine simply by having been taught emergency medicine may not be enough. Without professional development aimed at understanding theoretical frameworks, rigorous assessment, evaluating educational programs, and formulation of answerable education research questions, the quality of the outcomes will be limited at best. Emergency physicians are tasked with educational roles in every domain of our careers. We teach and learn from our patients, their families, our colleagues and our peers, in every realm in which we operate, whether clinical, administrative, or academic. Emergency physicians are nothing if not educators. Increasingly, though, emergency physicians are called upon as educational leaders and scholars, both within and beyond our specialty. Because emergency physicians are typically called upon to teach, lead, and discover, we must improve the quality of our educational efforts in each of these realms. Alpert Medical School of Brown University, Department of Emergency Medicine, Providence, Rhode Island Rhode Island Hospital/Hasbro Children’s Hospital, Department of Emergency Medicine and Pediatrics, Providence, Rhode Island