Teresa Man-Yee Chan

Toronto Metropolitan University · School of Medicine

Objectives: The objective was to determine the causes of and mitigating factors for conflict between emergency physicians and other colleagues during consultations. Methods: From March to September 2010, a total of 61 physicians (31 residents and 30 attendings from emergency medicine [EM], internal medicine, and general surgery) were interviewed...

Problem: As patient volumes increase, it is becoming increasingly important to find novel ways to teach junior medical learners about the intricacies of managing multiple patients simultaneously, as well as about working in a resource-limited environment. Approach: Serious games (i.e., games not intended purely for fun) are a teaching modality t...

Background In 2018, Canadian postgraduate emergency medicine (EM) programs began implementing a competency-based medical education (CBME) assessment program. Studies evaluating these programs have focused on broad outcomes using data from national bodies and lack data to support program-specific improvement. Objective We evaluated the implementati...

The 'Medical Education in Cases' Volume 5 is the last and final volume of this popular case series. These case books put difficult medical education cases under a microscope. We post challenging hypothetical dilemmas, moderate discussions on potential approaches, and recruit medical education experts to provide their insights. For further insight a...

Purpose: Physicians are often asked to integrate clinical decision rules (CDRs) with their own cognitive processes to reach a diagnosis. Clinicians, researchers, and educators must understand these cognitive processes in order to evaluate and improve the diagnostic process. The authors sought to explore emergency physicians' diagnostic processes a...

Background: Competency based residency programs depend on high quality feedback from the assessment of entrustable professional activities (EPA). The Quality of Assessment for Learning (QuAL) score is a tool developed to rate the quality of narrative comments in workplace-based assessments; it has validity evidence for scoring the quality of narrat...

Introduction: The free open access medical education (#FOAMed, or FOAM) movement creates educational content intended to inform medical education and clinical practice and is distributed in an unrestricted fashion (e.g., open access website). The who, what, and in particular the how of FOAM has raised important questions about the sustainability o...

Consensus methods such as the Delphi and nominal group techniques are increasingly utilized within medical education research. This educator's blueprint paper provides practical strategies regarding five key steps for ensuring best practices when using consensus methods. These strategies include deciding which consensus method is best, developing t...

Study objective: The unprecedented number of unfilled emergency medicine post-graduate year 1 (PGY-1) residency positions in the 2023 National Resident Matching Program shocked the emergency medicine community. This study investigates the association between emergency medicine program characteristics and the likelihood of unfilled positions in the...

Objective: The purpose of this study was to identify the learning needs of emergency physicians returning to Emergency Medicine (EM) practice after clinical leaves of less than 2 years, summarize existing return to practice programs, and propose recommendations regarding ideal educational and support structures for these physicians both during the...

Purpose: The increasing professionalization of medical education during the past 2 decades has ushered in an era in which formal degrees, particularly master's of health professions education (MHPE), have become important for career advancement in medical education. Although tuition costs can pose a substantial barrier for many seeking advanced de...

Background/aim Teaching, mentoring, coaching, supervising and sponsoring are often conflated in the literature. In this reflection, we clarify the distinctions, the benefits and the drawbacks of each approach. We describe a conceptual model for effective leadership conversations where leaders dynamically and deliberately ‘wear the hats’ of teacher,...

Objectives: This paper stems from a desire to deepen our own understanding of why women might 'say no' when allies and sponsors offer or create opportunities for advancement, leadership or recognition. The resulting disparity between representation by men and women in leadership positions, invited keynote speakers and publication counts in academi...

Introduction: Evaluation of education interventions is essential for continuous improvement as it provides insights into how and why outcomes occur. Specifically, for physicians' continuing professional development (CPD) programs, which aim to upskill physicians in a range of practice-essential domains, evaluations are crucial to assure physicians...

Objective Clinical interactions demand a balance of structure and flexibility in response to unpredictable situations. Medical improv is a form of experiential learning that applies techniques from improvisational theater to the healthcare setting, deliberately targeting clinical skills of communication, teamwork, and cognitive abilities. Psychiatr...

Background: Qualitative research explains observations, focusing on how and why phenomena and experiences occur. Qualitative methods go beyond quantitative data and provide critical information inaccessible through quantitative methods. However, at all levels of medical education, there is insufficient exposure to qualitative research. As a result...

Background: Without a clear understanding of the factors contributing to the effective acquisition of high-quality entrustable professional activity (EPA) assessments, trainees, supervising faculty, and training programs may lack appropriate strategies for successful EPA implementation and utilization. The purpose of this study was to identify bar...

Study objective: Given the popularity of educational blogs and podcasts in medicine, learners and educators need tools to identify trusted and impactful sites. The Social Media Index was a multi-sourced formula to rank the effect of emergency medicine and critical care blogs. In 2022, a key data point for the Social Media Index became unavailable....

Purpose: Leaders in academic health sciences centres (AHCs) must navigate multiple roles as an inherent component of their positions. Changing accountabilities, varying expectations, differing leadership competencies required of multiple leadership roles can be exacerbated by health system disruption, such as during the COVID-19 pandemic. We need i...

Intrinsic and extrinsic motivation in faculty development creates several reasons to address participation in a program. While the former depends on voluntary participation which is a prominent type for recruiting faculty members for faculty development, the latter is the result of certification and promotion purposes. Intrinsic motivation is easy...

This is a joint project between the McMaster Education Research, Innovation, and Theory (MERIT) unit, McMaster Faculty of Health Sciences Program for Faculty Development, and the McMaster Masters in Health Sciences Education program. This e-book has been published via McMaster University, Faculty of Health Sciences, Office of Continuing Professio...

Purpose: Leaders in academic health sciences centres (AHCs) must navigate multiple roles as an inherent component of their positions. Changing accountabilities, varying expectations, differing leadership competencies required of multiple leadership roles can be exacerbated by health system disruption, such as during the COVID-19 pandemic. We need...

Introduction Consensus group methods such as the Nominal Group Technique (NGT) and Delphi method are commonly used in research to elicit and synthesize expert opinions when evidence is lacking. Traditionally, the NGT involves a face-to-face interaction. However, due to the COVID-19 pandemic, many in-person meetings have moved to online settings. It...

Background: In medical education, there is a growing global demand for Open Educational Resources (OERs). However, OER creators are challenged by a lack of uniform standards. In this guideline, the authors curated the literature on how to produce OERs for medical education with practical guidance on the Do's, Don'ts and Don't Knows for OER creatio...

Introduction: Emergency medicine (EM) practitioners must be proficient at caring for patients of all ages, including pediatric patients. Traditionally, EM trainees learn pediatric emergency medicine (PEM) through block rotations. This is problematic due to the seasonal nature of pediatric diseases and infrequent critical events. Spaced repetition...

Purpose: These authors sought to define the new roles and competencies required of administrative staff and faculty in the age of CBME. Method: A modified Delphi process was used to define the new CBME roles and competencies needed by faculty and administrative staff. We invited international experts in CBME (volunteers from the ICBME Collaborat...

Introduction As the field of medical education evolves, there is a need to increase the quality of education scholarship and develop a cadre of research scholars; however, clinician educators (CEs) considering this career transition have limited formal training in education research methodology to heed this call. Therefore, a program that provides...

Background: Funding for educational innovations is increasingly scarce in academic medicine. While there is some funding for medical education research, this is often for discovery or application work, and there are few avenues for those with a heavy innovation focus to fund early work. Objective of the innovation: The objective was to develop a...

Introduction: Clinical faculty may have limited knowledge of education theories and best practices in health professions education. Many faculty development programs focus on passive learning with limited application to practice. There is a need for more active engagement for early career educators. Methods: We created an apprenticeship-based el...

Background The pandemic has upended much clinical care, irrevocably changing our health systems and thrusting emergency physicians into a time of great uncertainty and change. This study is a follow-up to a survey that examined the early pandemic experience among Canadian emergency physicians and aimed to qualitatively describe the experiences of t...

Purpose: Despite the importance of patient flow to emergency department (ED) management, there is a need to strengthen and expand training in flow strategies for practicing ED staff. To date, there has been limited academic inquiry into the skills and training that ED staff require to improve patient flow. As part of a quality improvement initiati...

Background The Standardized Letter of Evaluation (SLOE) stratifies the assessment of emergency medicine (EM) bound medical applicants. However, bias in SLOE, particularly regarding race and ethnicity, is an underexplored area. Objective This study aims to assess whether underrepresented in medicine (UIM) and non-UIM applicants are rated differentl...

Background: Free open-access medical education (FOAM) resources have become highly utilized resources in emergency medicine education. However, FOAM content often lacks the traditional peer review process, leaving quality assessment to the readers. In this systematic online academic resource (SOAR) review, we apply a systematic methodology to asse...

Background: The CanMEDS physician competency framework will be updated in 2025. The revision occurs during a time of disruption and transformation to society, healthcare, and medical education caused by the COVID-19 pandemic and growing acknowledgement of the impacts of colonialism, systemic discrimination, climate change, and emerging technologie...

Background: Free open-access medical education (FOAM) is a growing resource within the field of medicine, in particular, emergency medicine. Yet despite FOAM's contribution to advancing medical education, the precise value of FOAM has never been calculated. As a result, content creators have not been acknowledged, either financially or academicall...

Background COVID-19 has had a tremendous impact on medical education. Due to concerns of the virus spreading through gatherings of health professionals, in-person conferences and rounds were largely cancelled. The purpose of this study is the evaluate the implementation of an online educational curriculum by a major Canadian orthopaedic surgery res...

Infographics are a valuable tool for increasing knowledge translation and dissemination. They can be used to simplify complex topics and supplement the written text of a study. This Educator's Blueprint paper will provide 10 strategies for creating high‐quality infographics. These strategies include selecting appropriate content, defining the targe...

Background: Competency based medical education (CBME) relies on supervisor narrative comments contained within entrustable professional activities (EPA) for programmatic assessment, but the quality of these supervisor comments is unassessed. There is validity evidence supporting the QuAL (Quality of Assessment for Learning) score for rating the us...

Purpose: Healthcare leadership within academic health centres is increasingly complex. To handle this increasing complexity, we need models to support emerging and practicing leaders within health systems. Method: Through stakeholder consultation this conceptual review sought to examine leadership constructs and how they intersect with current lead...

In 2020 the Medical Council of Canada created a task force to make recommendations on the modernization of its practices for granting licensure to medical trainees. This task force solicited papers on this topic from subject matter experts. As outlined within this Concept Paper, our proposal would shift licensure away from the traditional focus on...

Introduction: The coronavirus disease 2019 pandemic disrupted the current practices for teaching and learning in medical and health professions education, creating challenges and opportunities for rapid transition. The authors describe how McMaster University's Program for Faculty Development (MacPFD) responded to this disruption by engaging in a...

Objective Emergency Medicine (EM) Sim Cases was initially developed in 2015 as a free open-access simulation resource. To ensure the future of EM Sim Cases remains relevant and up to date, we performed a needs assessment to better define our audience and facilitate long-term goals. Methods We delivered a survey using a modified massive-online-needs...

Program evaluation is an “essential responsibility” but is often not seen as a scholarly pursuit. While Boyer expanded what qualifies as educational scholarship, many still need to engage in processes that are rigorous and of a requisite academic standard to be labelled as scholarly. Many medical educators may feel that scholarly program evaluation...

BACKGROUND Free, open access meducation (FOAM) refers to open access, online learning resources in medicine. It includes all formats of digital products including blogs and podcasts. The number of FOAM sites in emergency medicine and critical care increased dramatically from 2002 to 2013, and physicians began to rely on the availability of these re...

Background Free open-access meducation (FOAM) refers to open-access, web-based learning resources in medicine. It includes all formats of digital products, including blogs and podcasts. The number of FOAM blog and podcast sites in emergency medicine and critical care increased dramatically from 2002 to 2013, and physicians began to rely on the avai...

Medical education researchers are often subject to challenges that include lack of funding, collaborators, study subjects, and departmental support. The construct of a research lab provides a framework that can be employed to overcome these challenges and effectively support the work of medical education researchers; however, labs are relatively un...

Purpose Postgraduate medical education in Canada has quickly transformed to a competency-based model featuring new entrustable professional activities (EPAs) and associated milestones. It remains unclear, however, how these milestones are distributed between the central medical expert role and 6 intrinsic roles of the larger CanMEDS competency fram...

Background: Canadian specialist residency training programs are implementing a form of competency-based medical education (CBME) that requires the assessment of entrustable professional activities (EPAs). Dashboards could be used to track the completion of EPAs to support program evaluation. Methods: Using a design-based research process, we ident...

Promotion and tenure (P&T) letters are a key component of the academic advancement portfolio. Despite their importance, many faculty are not trained to write these letters and there is limited literature describing the approach and key components. This paper reviews the role of P&T letters and provides general guidelines for writers. We present a s...

Background The COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted the need for reliable information, especially around vaccines. Vaccine hesitancy is a growing concern and a great threat to broader public health. The prevalence of social media within our daily lives emphasizes the importance of accurately analyzing how health information is being disseminated to th...

BACKGROUND The COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted the need for reliable information, especially, around vaccines. Vaccine hesitancy is a growing concern and a great threat to broader public health. The prevalence of social media within our daily lives emphasizes the importance of accurately analyzing how health information is being disseminated to t...

Introduction Faculty development is often deployed by central medical schools, with little guidance from end-users. How and what faculty members can use to improve their performance requires a deeper understanding from this user group. This study aims to explore how faculty perceive learners’ feedback about their performance as educators. Methods T...

Introduction Digitalizing workplace-based assessments (WBA) holds the potential for facilitating feedback and performance review, wherein we can easily record, store, and analyze data in real time. When digitizing assessment systems, however, it is unclear what is gained and lost in the message as a result of the change in medium. This study evalua...

Introduction The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic disrupted traditional in-person learning models. Free Open Access Medical (FOAM) education resources naturally filled this void, so we evaluated how medical blog and podcast utilization changed during the early months of the pandemic. Methods Academic medical podcast and blog producers w...

Objectives: The Standardized Letter of Evaluation (SLOE) is a vital portion of any medical student's emergency medicine (EM) residency application. Prior literature suggests gender bias in EM SLOE comparative ranking, but there is limited understanding of the impact of gender on other SLOE components. The study objective was to evaluate the presen...

Study objective The use of social media by health professionals is widespread. However, there is a lack of training to support the effective use of these novel platforms that account for the nuances of an effective health and research communication. We sought to identify the competencies needed by health care professionals to develop an effective s...

Leadership education in medicine is evolving to better meet the challenges of health care complexity, interprofessional practice, and threats from viruses and budget cuts alike. In this commentary, the authors build upon the findings of a scoping review by Matsas and colleagues, published in the same issue, and ask us to imagine what a learning eco...

This is the fourth volume of the popular series: Education Theory Made Practical which has been brought to you as a joint effort between the Academic Life in Emergency Medicine (ALiEM) Faculty Incubator program and the International Clinician Educator Blog. This project is made possible in part with funding from the Government of Ontario and throu...

This is the fifth volume of the popular ALiEM Faculty Incubator - International Clinician Educator Blog joint project: Education Theory Made Practical, Volume 5. This project is made possible in part with funding by the Government of Ontario and through eCampusOntario’s support of the Virtual Learning Strategy. To learn more about the Virtual Lear...

The Big Ideas Soapbox at Family Medicine Forum (FMF), formerly known as the Dangerous Ideas Soapbox, showcases ideas that could make a difference to clinical practice, faculty development, postgraduate or undergraduate education, patient care and outcomes, or health policy. This session offers a platform for innovators to share fresh ideas, innovat...

Objectives: A previous survey of Canadian emergency medicine (EM) physicians during the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic documented less than 20% experienced high levels of burnout. This study examined the experience of a similar group of physicians during the second pandemic wave. We reported the associations between burnout and physician age,...

This is a pre-print of our interview guide for the study: Faculty Feedback Needs

This is a study interview script.

Objectives Gender inequities are deeply rooted in our society and have significant negative consequences. Female physicians experience numerous gender-related inequities (e.g., microaggressions, harassment, violence). These inequities have far-reaching consequences on health, well-being and career longevity and may result in the devaluing of variou...

Background The journal club is a ubiquitous and time-honored tradition within medical education. However, in recent years, open educational resources (OERs) have become increasingly influential in how physicians interact with the medical literature across multiple specialties. The authors sought to explore how emergency medicine resident physicians...

Background: As technology advances, the gap between learning and doing continues to close-especially for frontline academic faculty and clinician educators. For busy clinician faculty members, it can be difficult to find time to engage in skills and professional development. Competing interests between clinical care and various forms of academic w...

Continuing professional development has changed drastically in the era after the COVID-19 pandemic. In-person conferences are now a distant memory, but staying current and relevant (especially in interdisciplinary fields such as psychonephrology) continue to be very important. This chapter seeks to provide readers with an overview of how a communit...