Engaging, interacting and connecting with our learners and teachers

In the first editorial of this year’s issue of Perspectives on Medical Education, Jan Borleffs [1] wrote about medical education being and becoming future proof: ‘Definitely, educational concepts based on previous approaches with proven effectiveness should be preserved, but the content of the programme needs to change in concurrence with the changes in society and the requirements for good health care in the next decades’. In this issue of PME, Jamiu Busari opens our eyes towards these changes in society and what the challenges are for good and sustainable health care, by ‘using’ the discourse of generation segmentation. Busari focuses on the changing needs and expectations of different generations as consumers of health care and as learners in the medical education domain. He characterises the new Millennial physician (born: 1985–2005) as ‘an expert in the science of medicine and (the interrelationships between) the social sciences and humanities related to clinical care’ [2]. This is enforced by a letter to this journal from two students from the USA. I presume both Millennial learners, make a plea for more attention to the humanities in medicine and medical education Ramai and Goldin [3], Their arguments for truly connecting and interacting with patients are very much in line with how Busari describes the needs of Millennial health consumers. Jerardi et al. [4] describe Millennial learners in their Show and Tell paper. They share with us how learners were more engaged during morning report educational sessions by using technology and entertainment to increase interaction. The authors were slightly disappointed that the intervention group (i.e. using multimedia, audience participation and faculty mentorship) did not show better results on knowledge retention testing. This is on the one hand understandable because, as Kirkpatrick [5] stated earlier (1996), engagement and fun seem to be essential