Where’s the patient’s voice in health professional education?

Angela Towle

In November 2015 the second international conference, ‘Where’s the Patient’s Voice in Health Professional Education?’ was held in Vancouver, Canada. The conference brought together 250 participants from 16 countries, including Brazil, to share experiences of involving patients as active participants in the education of health professionals. Uniquely for an academic conference, just over 20% of participants identified themselves as patients or community members and 13% were students. The conference was held 10 years after the first international conference on the topic in Vancouver which brought together the pioneers in the field to ‘map the territory’ of patient involvement¹. In 2015 we learned about the significant progress that has been made over the past decade

Historical perspective on patient involvement

The ‘patient as teacher’ has a long history. At the beginning of the 20^th century William Osler, one of the founding fathers of medical education, insisted that students learn from seeing and listening to patients. In Osler’s model of education, students would learn medicine in the lecture hall and laboratory for the first two years, followed by two years in which the hospital would become the college, and the patient the centre of learning, with books and lectures as tools. Osler’s idea of learning from the patient in the clinical setting continues to this day. Although the traditional ‘bedside teaching’ model is being replaced with more teaching in outpatient clinics or primary care, the patient’s role is still essentially passive. The patient is used as a living textbook or ‘clinical material’ to illustrate some important or interesting aspect of disease or disability, or as a subject on which students can practice their clinical skills. In these traditional approaches, students learn ‘on’ and ‘about’ patients. More recently, however, patients have started to play much more active roles as educators by which students learn ‘with’ and ‘from’ them.

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