Academic Doctors: Select but Prepare. Patricia S. O’Sullivan, EdD

Recently published commentary in Medical Education:

Academic Doctors: Select but Prepare.
Patricia S. O’Sullivan, EdD

For those of us in medical education, preparing future faculty members is a major concern and we have attempted to understand the process by which we do this.1 In this issue, Cavalcanti and Detsky2 report on a study of the relationship between the number of publications that a resident has upon entering a residency and his or her subsequent clinical performance. They found little association, but the authors had hoped that publishing history would be a good indicator for a promising career in academic medicine in that it might reflect scholarship and good clinical skills. This study generated a number of questions about what publications might actually be proxy for and, in so doing, highlighted the issue of selecting versus developing future academic doctors. Addressing this dilemma requires the answering of three questions: What is an academic doctor? Can we select for this person? What should we be doing to prepare residents who are interested in becoming academic doctors?

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MEDICAL EDUCATION 2010; 44: 438–439
Article