Melissa Carr, Communications Coordinator – VFMP
Dr. DeWitt began her appointment as the Regional Associate Dean for the Vancouver Fraser Medical Program in January of 2012. I sat down with her recently to talk about what brought her to Vancouver, what she thinks so far and what her goals will be for the coming year.
What excites you about your new role here with UBC’s Faculty of Medicine? What really “sold” you on this position?
There are a number of reasons I wanted to work with UBC. Part of it was very practical: our (my husband’s and my) parents are getting older and (we were) looking for interesting opportunities to be back in North America…
Mostly, what excites me are the people and the opportunity for innovation. I have just been wowed by everyone I have met here. Originally, it looked like a pretty traditional medical school curriculum. Even in the 6 months since I interviewed, the curriculum renewal and task force have come so far in making something really cool. Dean Stuart is a really inspiring leader who cares a lot about his team and it’s pretty clear that people love working here. Good leadership makes for a good working environment and culture. It has been so fun.
Also, having been at a distributed site for almost nine years, I really kind of wanted to be back in the middle of things. It was a chance for me to come back and be more focused on medical education rather than building campuses and programs.
As Regional Associate Dean to Vancouver Fraser, what do you hope to be able to accomplish in your first year?
I have been trying to listen and learn to really understand the system here from the viewpoints of everybody. I’ve sat in on lectures both from here and from the sites. I’ve been to all the sites now. So my first goal is to really understand things. My second goal, having been a PBL student myself, having facilitated PBL and having attended some PBLs here, is to probably change the PBL approach here. I think we’ve got a lot of brilliant stuff going on, there’s no doubt about that. There are some really wonderful sessions and we’ve got amazing teachers. I think what we unintentionally have is a lot of redundancy. On the other hand, in an era where there is so, so, so much to learn we really need to be doing deliberate things like teaching students how to access information in real time to solve clinical problems. We need to start teaching students how to look at all the resources on the web and say should we use Google Scholar? Do we use the Cochrane database? Should we use Wikipedia? Are those resources good? When are they good? When should they (students) just be using a book? We need to deliberately educate students about those things as we go so that as new stuff comes up they know how to judge it. And right now we don’t have students use resources in PBL and I think we probably should in a limited and deliberate way.
Knowing what you do about Distributed Education, what would you want students to know upon entering this kind of program? What are the challenges and benefits?
The benefits are, I think, that regional and rural sites are the best places for medical students to train. They get continuity of teachers to a much greater degree than being in a tertiary hospital. That’s really important for coaching to really improve students’ skills. If you are working with a different person every one to two months, they can only help you improve for that little bit of time, whereas if there is someone who knows you over the years, and they really get to know your clinical skills, they can help you much more. That is really important for medical students and their development as doctors. I think tertiary hospitals are probably better places for residents…not that undergrad students shouldn’t see a tertiary hospital but I honestly believe that regional places are better places for medical students to train.
(One challenge with) clinical learning is that it a distinctive learning style. If you don’t figure out how to learn around patients and you don’t have the discipline to do that, you can just go along on the buddy track and not really be pushed with the rigor that people are used to in academic training centres. I have seen a few times where students aren’t self-motivated or organized and they just wander around or the default is that they go to their room or to the library instead of going to the clinical setting and really practicing their skills. You have to get connected, stay connected and have to have some learning goals and pursue those goals if you are at an ICC type site where it is not laid out for you every day. But once you get through that, I think the students who do really well grow and learn during that year.
In one interview, you mentioned that you worked as a physician in the Seattle jail to help pay off your student loans. You said it was a great learning experience. What did you learn that has influenced your work today?
A lot of residents will do what is called “moonlighting” and in Seattle at the time we were allowed to moonlight in our third year. My goal was to work every month enough to pay off my student loans. A lot of people would work in the private hospitals but somehow somebody I knew through working at the public hospital said I should think about working at the jail and I thought, “Wow, that’s confronting, but it would be probably good for me to learn about this.”
We would have a lot of people come in (to the jail) who were having drug withdrawal, uncontrolled diabetes, seizures or heart problems and because a lot of these people were homeless or socio-economically deprived, they hadn’t had proper care. It was really interesting and, in the two years that I worked there, I only ever once felt threatened. I would just treat everybody with respect. It was a fascinating learning experience. You can go and work at a hospital any day but these were people who really needed care. It’s pretty important to do some of that give back stuff.
So far, what do you think about Vancouver?
Vancouver is cold and wet and rainy and after living in Australia for nine years, oh my gosh, it’s just so cold and wet and rainy! And when I woke up this morning it was still dark!
But, the food here!! Oh wow, what great variety. Coming from a small town in Australia where we had 5 or 6 restaurants on a good day it’s just been, “oh my goodness!” Chinese takeout, sushi, Indian, Malaysian… oh yum! But, the wine’s not as good here.
The views are brilliant. I can see Mount Baker from my office on a clear day….
What motivates your work? What inspires you?
“Life is what you do and who you do it with.” What inspires me is getting to work with all of these brilliant people. And the thing I really love is seeing students “get it”…for anybody in medical education that’s the fun stuff.
What are the professional accomplishments of which you are most proud?
Sometimes survival is one (an accomplishment)!
My teaching awards, I guess. It’s not polite to brag though. They have this saying in Australia “don’t be a tall poppy, because if you’re the tallest poppy in the field you’re going to get cut down to size.”
Everybody wants to make a difference somehow. I’m really proud of having nominated a lot of my staff in Australia for awards for things that they have done.
(I’m proud of) creating a positive working culture and having a really happy, thriving staff group where people feel like they are listened to and they feel like they can make a contribution…I honestly believe I managed to do that in Australia. It’s one of the things you see here in the distributed sites. (In) a smaller team people feel very connected and very proud of having built something. I hope we can make sure that everyone here feels that way, too, that they are part of a really vibrant and exciting team.
We are so lucky…we have amazing people here. There is no reason why UBC shouldn’t become the best medical school in Canada…not that I’m competitive or anything!