TRAINING and EDUCATION
How I Teach
Craig S. Kitchens, MD, MACP, discusses the importance of
communication and the doctor-patient relationship. Dr. Kitchens
is professor emeritus of medicine in the division of hematology
and oncology at the University of Florida College of Medicine in
Gainesville, Florida, and also the winner of the 2015 ASH Clinical
Investigator Mentor Award.
THE PATIENT CONNECTION
With Craig S. Kitchens, MD
hat qualities
make a good
mentor?
To me, mentoring
and teaching are
essentially two sides
of the same coin: One cannot teach well
without mentoring well and one certainly
cannot mentor well without teaching
well. So, a good mentor is a good teacher.
Personally, I admire physicians who
are loquacious and who speak from
their heart when speaking with students,
sick patients, or their families. They are
straight-shooters – if the patient has a
poor prognosis, they don’t talk around
or dodge the issue. Patients, like all of
us, want honesty, whether it’s regarding a
pulmonary embolism or a tubal ligation.
People want to know what you’re doing
and why you’re doing it.
As a house officer, I had the opportunity to work with some of the best
professors in the world and, if there is
one thing I would pass on to my trainees, it would be to not waste precious
opportunities. I would sit down for coffee
with one of these brilliant minds and ask them, point-blank, “You’re
recognized as an authority in medicine – how did you get smart?”
No matter the field they were in, they offered strikingly similar advice: work hard and pick great role models. If one of my trainees asked
me that question, I’d give them the same answer. When you’re listening
to your professors talk, find out what you like about their style (their
bedside manner, their knowledge, how they handle difficult patients),
and emulate that. Keep doing that, and by the end of your medical
training, you’ll have a decent collection of traits to build your style.
How do you teach professionalism to your trainees and
mentees?
Professionalism is a necessity. From my viewpoint, as a member of a
consultative team such as hematology, we have to become knowledgeable about the broad spectrum of internal medicine because I can get
called at any time by anybody. In consultative service, we need to be
both generalists and specialists – ready to go at a moment’s notice and
ready to work with other health-care team members.
Often, consulting means