Many of you have faculty responsibilities that include evaluating trainees of different levels, specifically undergraduate and graduate medical education. These assessments are often used as the foundation for both formative and summative feedback and play an important role in determining medical competence. As the goal of any training program is to graduate professionals who can provide high quality patient care, it is of upmost importance that assessments are accurate, informative and truly reflective of a trainee’s performance. The implications of inaccurate assessments can potentially have real world repercussions, namely effects upon patient outcomes. There is evidence to support that gaps in clinical performance can persist into independent practice and speak to the quality of training received. Therefore it is reasonable to conclude that training programs must trust that assessments submitted by faculty are precise to the greatest extent possible.

Have you ever asked yourself what you would attempt to do if you knew you could not fail? Failure is scary. It is typically not celebrated or advertised. However, in this #MedEdPearls, we look at ways to acknowledge and embrace our vulnerabilities and find the childlike wonder that comes from failure and leads to innovation. If we are not attempting great things, amazing things stop happening. By embracing failure, amazing things become possible. 

The Harvard Macy Institute Podcast aims to connect our Harvard Macy Institute community and to develop our interest in health professions education topics and literature. Our podcast is hosted by our Program for Educators in the Health Professions course faculty Victoria Brazil, and will feature interviews with health professions education authors and their research papers. 

Season 2, Episode 4 features Harvard Macy Institute Leading Innovations in Health Care and Education course directors Liz Armstrong, Derek van Bever and Josh Nagler, together with 2020 scholars Tanya Holt and Tanya Horsley, reflection on the why, what and how of developing leaders for 21^st century education and healthcare.           

That this past summer the Baystate Health WOW (Wellness on Wheels) bus, our mobile healthcare effort, rolled out into the community during the national crisis seems antithetic to our current context of virtual learning and social distance. As the pandemic hit underserved communities of black and Latinx residents in Western Massachusetts, the privilege of a planning period for the mobile classroom was replaced with an urgency to intervene.

Shrouded in tradition and long held symbol of prestige in academia, the Visiting Professorship has arguably lost its original purpose of furthering education, and rather has remained a vestige of academic notoriety and fodder for promotion. As such, and in particular in the setting of economic hardships, the Visiting Professorship has been diminishing in popularity, with the few major academic radiology programs who host Visiting Professors reporting hosting just a handful per year. However, the educational advantages of a lecture or a didactic case conference by physician subject experts from different institutions have been long documented and are in particular advantageous in a rapidly evolving field such as radiology. Thus, as the pandemic upended medical education everywhere and radiology case volumes have drastically dropped which significantly decreased radiology residents’ educational opportunities we sought to leverage the increasing widespread utilization of videoconferencing and reinvented Visiting Professorship in a virtual format.