The Josiah Macy Jr. Foundation convenes conferences to examine key topics in health professions education (HPE) and clinical learning environments. Conference participants—invited for their relevant expertise—discuss commissioned papers and craft recommendations intended to help optimize HPE and advance health and health care for everyone. Through these intensive working meetings, we are helping to disseminate educational innovations and shape the national conversation around preparing our health care workforce to meet the needs of 21st century patients.
Today’s Macy Foundation conferences continue a long tradition of such meetings, whose purpose has always been to widely share information that, ultimately, helps health professionals improve patient care and outcomes. The first conference, held in 1931, focused on the educational needs of professional social workers, and by the 1940s, regular conferences were helping to spread medical research and patient care innovations emerging from World War II battlefields and military hospitals.
From the mid-1940s to the mid-1950s, the Foundation hosted annual conferences on the nascent science of cybernetics. The participation in these meetings of high-profile experts from across many fields and professions helped establish Macy conferences as interdisciplinary platforms for advancing emerging areas of research and knowledge. During the American Civil Rights Era in the 1960s and 70s, our conferences were exploring, among other topics, inequalities in health care and ways to encourage more women and people of color to pursue careers in the health professions.
Today’s Macy Foundation conferences, held every 1-2 years, focus primarily on the Foundation’s three priority areas, but also respond to immediate challenges in health professions education, such as the 2021 conference on COVID-19 and the Impact on Medical and Nursing Education and the upcoming 2024 conference on Artificial Intelligence and Medical Education. The important discussions and consensus recommendations from these and other meetings from recent decades are captured and made widely available through a variety of resources and materials, including special issues of Academic Medicine, conference proceedings and recommendations reports, blog posts, webinars, and podcasts.