Society of Teachers for Family Medicine Conference
Posted on April 18, 2016 by Kelli Hines | No Comments
Tiffany Moxham received the MLGSCA Professional Development Award. Interested to see how she used it? Here is her account:
The MLGSCA professional development grant allowed me to present at the Society of Teacher’s for Family Medicine’s [STFM] Medical Student Education conference in Phoenix. My topic, “Librarian outreach to support retention and reward of community preceptors” garnished more conversations, input and expansion ideas that I had envisioned. One of the conference themes was the recruitment and retention of community preceptors so the offers of cooperation and connected integration were expansive. The integration of outreach services into a variety of existing School of Medicine programs was specifically hardily greeted. I was particularly interested in the doctors’ candid expression of how they view librarians’ roles within medical schools and clinical settings.
Multiple sessions opened up ideas for future librarian support. The area of nutrition in medical education is not a subject I would have thought about beyond teaching obesity, the food groups, and diet regimes. In turns out that there are several innovative programs that bring healthy cooking and pragmatic nutrition guidance into medical education. One of these programs shows medical students how to make meals that are affordable, quick, and healthy. With obesity levels and related comorbidity at a high, these programs take our future doctors from lecturing to provision of pragmatic options. This also opens up community opportunities at all levels. On return, when I started to look into this I found that locally one program teaches “at risk” teenagers healthy cooking habits, another places a farmer’s market outside of a hospital once a week. These types of programs, when paired with medical students, also assist in creating connections and understand of the community outside the clinical setting. Teaching with technology and new products are of course always a bedrock for librarians’ curriculum involvement. While a couple of new products were showcased, enhancement and novel use of existing products led this category. This served as a timely reminder of the counter productivity of stockpiling and implementing new products and teaching tools without investing in training and development time.
Perhaps the most important part of attending STFM was being able to be a part of internal innovation that was being formulated during the conference. Collaborating with my own faculty on ideas being newly formulated after each conference talk or poster session was priceless. That these ideas could then immediately be reviewed by those from around the country is the center of why conference attendance can be so important. So thank you to the MLGSCA Awards Committee and all those who support MLGSCA for providing me with one of the Professional Development Grants this year. In addition to the personal learning and collaboration the conference provided, I hope to share service improvements and new collaboration ideas beyond my own institution.
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