How Can We Create Osler’s “Great Physician”? Fundamentals for Physicians’ Competency in the Twenty-first Century

Authors:

Gabriel M. Ronen, Olaf Kraus de Camargo, Peter Rosenbaum

In: Medical Science Educator

Providing excellent clinical care, as Sir William Osler would have valued, is ultimately about understanding and addressingeffectively the human dramas of personal predicaments (including those experienced by healthcare providers). In order to teach and to learn these concepts, we need to fuse medical sciences with practical frameworks that actively incorporate and integrate the humanities into medicine. Teaching learners both to recognize and to become comfortable with these aspects of medicine is essential, and there are multiple opportunities to do this well. We argue that if these concepts are introduced early in education and training, reinforced as granular elements of all professional training, and modeled for learners by health professional leaders, there will be a powerful transformation of the whole health system, led by a new generation of enlightened and open-minded professionals. The widespread integration into medical training of the ICF, specific attention to patients’ voices, and everyday ethics not only poses significant challenges, but equally importantly represents a substantial opportunity.