Preceptor Development

Editor's Note: In this month's column, Roberto Cardarelli, DO, MPH, and Mark Sanders, DO, JD, of the University of North Texas Health Science Center give useful suggestions on how office-based teachers can help learners practice an evidence-based medicine approach when caring for patients.

Editor's Note: In this month's column, James Dykes, MD, discusses the importance of teaching students to listen to their patients and describes how he does so in his practice. Dr. Dykes is a family physician in Durham, NC, and a community preceptor for Duke University and the University of North Caroline.

Editor's Note: In this month's column, Alison Dobbie, MD; James Tysinger, PhD; and Jushua Freeman, MD, give practical tips to help the office-based preceptor efficiently teach students during busy patient care sessions. Drs Dobbie and Freeman are faculty members of the University of Kansas School of Medicine and Dr Tysinger is a faculty member of the University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio.

Editor's Note: In this month's column, Lynn-Beth Satterly, MD, of SUNY Upstate Medical University in Syracuse presents a new model of precepting that office-based teachers can use in addition to their usual precepting practices. This model encourages students to independently learn about infrequently taught office-based issues and discuss their findings with their preceptors.

Editor's Note: As project co-director, Paul Paulman, MD, of the University of Nebraska and a number of other education leaders worked together to create the Family Medicine Curriculum Resource (FMCR). This resource is designed to help medical school faculty refine and further develop curricula in family medicine. In this month's column, Dr. Paulman explains how this resource also is of value to office-based teachers of family medicine.

Editor's Note: In this month's column, Sweety Jain, MD, of the Sacred Heart Hospital Family Practice Residency in Allentown, PA, discusses important items that should be discussed with residents and students when orienting them to office practice.

Editor's Note: In this month's column, Robert Oh, MD, of the Department of Family Medicine at Madigan Army Medical Center in Tacoma, Wash, explains the teaching method used by Socrates and discusses how office-based teachers can use and expand on this method to help learners learn new knowledge. Dr Oh has written an article of similar content that was published in the Spring 2004 edition of Uniformed Family Physician, journal of the Uniformed Services Academy of Family Physicians. This month's column is published with the written permission of the Uniformed Services Academy of Family Physicians.

Editor's Note:  In this month's column, Alison Dobbie, MD, of the University of Kansas and James Tysinger, PhD, of the University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio review current reports in the literature on the need for feedback and on effective strategies to give feedback. Based on these reports, they offer suggestions on how the office-based teacher can give effective feedback to learners.

Editor's Note: As chair of Task Force 6, Stephen Spann, MD, of the Department of Family and Community Medicine at Baylor College of Medicine, worked with other family medicine leaders on the Future of Family Medicine project, which investigated how the specialty can adapt to provide quality health care in a changing environment and proposed a New Model of Family Medicine care. In this month's column, Dr. Spann briefly describes the New Model of care and discusses how office-based teaching of medical students may change in practices that adopt it.