Department of Medicine Weekly Roundup - Jan 16
Please see below for the following updates:
- Raphael Schneider appointed Elizabeth S. Barford Early Career Professorship in Multiple Sclerosis
- CMAJ Top 10 Articles for most media coverage
- Thrombosis Clinic Referrals in Epic
- Teaching Evaluations
- myTE: Helping teachers get timely, meaningful, confidential feedback
- Call for nominations for the UT Department of Medicine Prizes & Awards and Resident Awards
Congratulations to Dr. Raphael Schneider on his appointment as the Elizabeth S. Barford Early Career Professorship in Multiple Sclerosis, beginning on January 1, 2025!
Dr. Raphael Schneider is a neurologist at St. Michael’s Hospital, caring for individuals with multiple sclerosis (MS) at the BARLO MS Centre. He completed a Ph.D. in neuroscience at the University of Toronto, focusing on biomarkers in neurological diseases, and a postdoctoral fellowship in neuroimmunology at the Université de Montréal. Dr. Schneider also completed the Department of Medicine’s Eliot Phillipson Clinician-Scientist Training Program.
He is an Assistant Professor at UT in the Department of Medicine and the Institute of Medical Science. Additionally, he leads a laboratory at the Keenan Research Centre for Biomedical Science, where his research focuses on the discovery of blood and spinal biomarkers. His work is supported by MS Canada and Brain Canada.
Congratulations to Jillian Alston and Amol Verma whose articles were in the top 10 CMAJ articles for the most media coverage! Jill’s analysis on late life homelessness was #5 and Amol’s article on clinical evaluation of a machine learning-based early warning system for patient deterioration came in at #9. (See attached for the full list.)
For new referrals to the St. Michael's Hospital Thrombosis Clinic for all inpatients and outpatients, please ensure that the request is made as an "Ambulatory referral to Thrombosis, NOT "Follow Up In Thrombosis" (even if the patient was previously seen by Heme Consults/Thrombosis in hospital)
This will ensure that the request is triaged in a timely manner. Otherwise, the referral will be directed to a non-triage worklist which may lead to delays in your patients being seen.
Sincerely,
Eric Tseng, Vera Dounaevskaia, Natasha Rupani
Dear Colleagues,
Teaching evaluations allow students to provide feedback on teachers and identify those whom they deem excellent or in need of improvement. However, there are several reasons why our current system of evaluating teaching is problematic.
First, as Drs. Shiphra Ginsburg and Lynfa Stroud have outlined in their commentary on this issue1, student evaluations of teachers do not necessarily correlate with actual learning. Evaluations may reflect opinions on non-teaching-related factors such as the organization of rotations or be confounded by teacher attractiveness and charisma; women and underrepresented groups may be particularly disadvantaged. This is not to say that teaching evaluations don’t provide valuable information – just that in isolation, they may not be the best measure of teaching effectiveness. Continue reading.
Dr. Moira Kapral
Sir John and Lady Eaton Professor and Chair of Medicine
Mark your calendars! Lynfa and Shiphra will give SMH Medical Grand Rounds on this topic on March 26, 2025.
Despite the value of feedback, in clerkship alone, 70% of teachers do not receive feedback (MD Program, University of Toronto, Nov. 22, 2022 newsletter). Dr. Esther Bui, a neurologist and clinician educator, has been working tirelessly to help teachers who face the feedback dilemma by developing an innovative evaluation platform for the fast-paced clinical teaching environment. Dr. Bui believes that good teachers teach well, but great teachers learn well, especially when they receive timely, rich, meaningful feedback in an environment that sees and enables their full potential.
myTE, abbreviated from my Teaching Evaluation, was designed by Dr. Bui in response to the challenges clinical teachers experience in documenting and evaluating their teaching. It is a simple-to-use, secure, universal platform that captures any teaching, anywhere, any time. In less than 30 seconds, myTE enables teachers to open real-time pathways for meaningful, confidential feedback. The platform currently has 1000+ registered users around the world and has enabled 10,000+ evaluations. As people learn about myTE, its utility is expanding to both clinical and non-clinical (research) teaching, as well as to surgery, anesthesia, dentistry, nursing and allied health.
In 2022, myTE Professional Suite (myTEprof.com) was launched with significant advancements such as autogenerated QR codes, direct links and notifications, as well as a suite of powerful tools such as portfolio creation and teaching metrics dashboards. These enhancements take on the administrative heavy lifting of the teaching dossier process to enable teachers to simply teach and learn with access to timely, confidential and secure feedback. This exciting new platform is opening up more pathways for good teachers to become great teachers.
If you would like to learn more, let Olivia share her story!
Each year, the Department of Medicine honours faculty members who have made significant and meaningful contributions to education, teaching, research, quality and innovation, humanism, mentorship and clinical practice. These prizes and awards celebrate our faculty members and recognize the local and global impact of the Department of Medicine. The department will also be awarding resident awards again this year.
Faculty prizes and awards are presented at the Department of Medicine’s Annual Day and resident awards are presented at our department’s Graduation ceremony in June. Click here to review faculty award descriptions and click here to review resident award descriptions.
This year, we will be awarding the following faculty awards:
Robert Hyland Award for Excellence in Mentorship (Mid-Career)
Robert Hyland Award for Excellence in Mentorship (Late Career)
Department of Medicine Academy of Master Clinicians
Michael Gordon Award for Humanism in Medicine
Department of Medicine Teacher of the Year Award
Department of Medicine Mid-Career Teaching Award
Department of Medicine Award in Quality and Innovation
The William Goldie Prize and Travel Awards
Eaton Scholar Researcher of the Year Awards (one for basic science and one for clinical)
Details on how to submit a nomination are listed under each award. Nomination packages for DoM Awards, including the nomination checklist, should be submitted in a single PDF file by April 1, 2025 to [email protected].
We will also be awarding the following resident awards:
Department of Medicine Outstanding Research Trainee Awards
Department of Medicine Resident Teacher of the Year Award
Department of Medicine Award for Excellence in Mentorship
Department of Medicine Emerging Clinician Award
Nomination packages for Resident Awards should be submitted in a single PDF file by April 1, 2025 to [email protected].