Lauren Meade, MD, of Tufts University Medical School is part of Macy’s 2013 Scholar Class. As a Macy Faculty Scholar, Meade developed a new competency-based curriculum focused on providing safe and effective hospital discharges. We sat down with Dr. Meade to hear about her time as a Macy Faculty Scholar.
What has being a Macy Faculty Scholar meant to you?
Being a Macy Faculty Scholar has been an extraordinary experience and journey for me to develop my research and leadership skills in health education. I was able to partner with the other Scholars in my cohort to overcome challenges and discuss new ideas about how to train health professionals.
What do you know now as an educator that you didn’t before?
My research as a Macy Scholar was focused on improving the training of physicians in the hospital discharge process. We piloted a discharge curriculum at 15 Internal Medicine programs across the country. In discussion groups of physicians, nurses and patients we developed a list of behaviors that physician trainees need to use in order to safely discharge patients from the hospital. Our interprofessional team marveled at the fact that we had never developed curriculum together or even had conversations together about critical healthcare processes such as discharge from the hospital. This project really made me aware of the value of collaboration with the interprofessional team and the patient.
What’s next for your project?
Our early findings suggest that the discharge curriculum is successful in developing competency in the physician trainees for discharging a patient from the hospital. The most impacted behaviors in the curriculum are linked to the discharge summary, communication with patients, medication reconciliation and anticipating barriers to discharge.The curriculum had less impact on collaboration and communication with the discharge team. Our next step will be to structure the discharge curriculum intentionally around team collaboration and communication.
What advice do you have for educational innovators today?
As health educators, we should be embarking on both patient-centered care and interprofessional collaboration. Anything that we can do to listen to patient experiences or include patients in curriculum design is going to be incredibly powerful. We need to try and move away from our own individual silos, and bring patients and our health professions colleagues into our work.
Learn more about Dr. Meade’s work at Tufts.