The Harvard Macy Institute Podcast S3 E1: Connecting Scholarship to Practice in Health Professions Education with Lara Varpio and Subha Ramani

The Harvard Macy Institute Podcast aims to connect our Harvard Macy Institute community and to develop our interest in health professions education topics and literature. Our podcast is hosted by our Program for Educators in the Health Professions course faculty Victoria Brazil, and will feature interviews with health professions education authors and their research papers.

S3 E1 Podcast features Subha Ramani and Lara Varpio having a conversation about scholarship in health professions education, and how to make this academic work accessible and applicable for educators.

Scholarship in health professions education is often based on paradigms and methodologies unfamiliar to clinician educators. This risks a ‘disconnect’ – where educators may be looking for randomized controlled trials, and scholars are providing theoretical frameworks and thematic analysis!

In this episode Lara Varpio and Subha Ramani discuss their scholarly work in health professions education and how they have made that work rigorous and useful to practitioners, while also educating their readers and challenging some positivist norms.

Lara Varpio is Professor, Center for Health Professions Education & Department of Medicine and Associate Director of Research, Center for Health Professions Education at the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences in Maryland. Subha Ramani is Associate Professor of Medicine, Harvard Medical School, and an internal medicine physician at the Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston. She is senior faculty with the Harvard Macy Institute.

We had an interesting discussion on the cultural contexts in which this scholarship is placed and look forward to more ‘bidirectional’ influence of non-Western perspectives on knowledge and ‘ways of knowing.’ Subha and Lara provided excellent advice to those early in their scholarship journey – being clear on goals, engaging in scholarship for the right reasons and the importance of collaboration. Many thanks to them for their time and expertise!

Watch out for new episodes this year which will be announced on our blog and our Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook social media channels.

Did you know that the Harvard Macy Institute Community Blog has had more than 285 posts? Previous blog posts have explored topics including developing leaders for healthcare and education, leading curricular change, and systems of assessment in educational settings.

Author BIO

Victoria Brazil, MD (Educators, ’05, Leaders ’07, Assessment ‘10) is Professor of Emergency Medicine and Director of Simulation at Bond University Faculty of Health Sciences and Medicine. Her research interests include podcasting and simulation, and she is co-producer of Simulcast - a podcast about healthcare simulation. Victoria can be followed on Twitter.