Coach K., John Wooden, Pat Summitt: Some of sports’ great coaches may influence the education of future physicians. As medical education undergoes a transformation, more schools are taking plays out of coaches’ books as they train medical students.
In med ed, a coach is different from an advocate or an advisor.
“A coach is a 2x4,” said Nicole Deiorio, MD, director of the undergraduate coaching program at Oregon Health and Science University. “They can be there to support the student and hold them up … or they’re there to ... present reality to them.”
The school started a coaching program to ensure its graduating students were people who “acknowledge that they have a lifetime of self-improvement ahead of them,” said Dr. Deiorio at a recent consortium meeting of the AMA’s Accelerating Change in Medical Education initiative. “Humans in general are not great at self-assessment …. We want to create students who are better self-assesors, and there’s always room for an external assessor—a coach—to give them feedback.”
How med ed coaching is playing out
OHSU rolled out its coaching program at the beginning of this academic year with 28 coaches, each paired with five entering medical students. Each successive year, coaches will take on five additional students to have a cohort of 20 students. Coaches sign up for a four-hour weekly commitment.
They aren’t evaluating students, but they are privy to every piece of academic information about their students. One-on-one meetings between a student and a coach occur about every three weeks, and a structured form allows the coach to focus on identified areas the student wants to improve.
The coach also hosts cohort meetings with all of their students, using the time to discuss themes such as problem solving, ethical issues and grief.
“It’s not just academic,” Dr. Deiorio said, pointing to wellness issues as another example. In that case, the coach would help the student get the assistance they required. To be prepared, coaches met with representatives from the school’s range of student services, from student health to financial management.
Sharing the win
Coaching programs in medical school are still in the nascent stages, so there isn’t a lot of literature on the topic as it applies to medical education. However, it isn’t difficult to see how it relates to athletic coaching, which relies on ongoing skills assessment and specific feedback. And coaching has been used in the business world to “provide a results-oriented and stigma-free method to address burnout,” according to a 2014 article in the Journal of General Internal Medicine.
So far, Dr. Deiorio said, students are playing ball with the idea of coaches. Initial evaluations show student satisfaction is high.
Other schools in the consortium are learning from OHSU’s experience. If it proves to be a winning idea, they will be able to apply that knowledge to begin their own coaching programs in the future.
