TEACHING ROUNDS Teaching when time is limited

Clinical teachers face a daunting challenge of simultaneously caring for patients and teaching learners in a time constrained environment. A cohort study of 179 Dutch medical students (79% of the cohort) during an internal medicine clerkship located at 14 different clinical sites found that the quality of supervision has a greater impact on clinical competence and knowledge than does the number of patients seen. Even small moments of teaching time can offer important learning opportunities to trainees by providing them with new insights and skills that they would not acquire from simply seeing patients on their own. Toachieve this combinedcaringand teachinggoal ina time efficient manner, clinical teachers use various strategies to (a) identify the needs of each individual learner, (b) teach according to these specific needs, and (c) provide feedback on performance. This three step teaching process can be adapted to the environment in which the teaching is taking place. Here we describe several time efficient strategies in relation to each step in this process.