Melissa Bregger, MD, assistant professor of Medication within the Division of Hospital Medication, has been named assistant medical director for persevering with medical schooling at Feinberg.
Bregger accomplished medical faculty and her residency at Northwestern, the place she developed an curiosity in high quality and course of enchancment that she now applies in her position as medical director at 15 East, an inpatient medicine-telemetry unit.
“What actually excited me about becoming a member of the Workplace of Persevering with Medical Schooling was that it’s not nearly doctor schooling and checking packing containers for persevering with medical schooling necessities. It’s throughout all disciplines within the healthcare system,” Bregger mentioned. “A lot about the way forward for persevering with medical schooling excited me, and I’m trying ahead to utilizing my love of schooling and course of enchancment, in addition to my artistic, modern facet, to form this position to be my very own.”
Learn a Q&A with Bregger and Clara Schroedl, MD, medical director for persevering with medical schooling, under.
Inform me a bit about your self and your background.
Bregger: I’m initially from Cleveland. I’m additionally a first-generation school graduate. My grandma, who was an immigrant from Puerto Rico, taught fourth grade within the Cleveland Public Colleges for over 40 years. She taught English as a second language. So, I’ve a ardour for schooling in my genes.
I had a complete totally different profession earlier than I pursued medical faculty. I was a full-time medical researcher after which determined to pursue drugs. I got here to Northwestern for medical faculty after which stayed for my residency in inner drugs.
That is my sixth yr as a college member right here at Northwestern, and I’ve served numerous roles. An enormous emphasis in my background and coaching has been in high quality enchancment or course of enchancment.
I even have one other position as unit medical director of 15 East, which is an inpatient drugs unit. In that position, I work very intently with all types of various disciplines, particularly nurses, however actually everybody from affected person care techs to environmental providers to respiratory therapists and everybody in between.
Dr. Schroedl, what are you trying ahead to as your workforce grows?
Schroedl: Our workplace has a extremely massive footprint and it’s solely gotten larger during the last a number of years because the Northwestern Medication well being system has grown bigger.
Along with progress, we’ve had disruption associated to COVID-19 and the altering wants of physicians and platforms for delivering schooling.
Now we have a variety of totally different learners to succeed in and we are attempting to be artistic in growing schooling to fulfill the wants of each sort of learner. We’re actually excited to have Dr. Bregger be part of us, in order that we will suppose creatively about new methods to coach all our learners, whether or not that’s our physicians or, as she talked about, our whole interprofessional workforce.
Not everyone needs to simply sit in a lecture corridor and get an hour-long didactic lecture. We’d like to consider methods to make it interactive and high-value. We don’t wish to educate with out the content material truly main to alter in efficiency and the flexibility to look after our sufferers.
Having Dr. Bregger to suppose via methods to assist CME exercise planners innovate and create extra impactful schooling is de facto thrilling.
What’s your imaginative and prescient for persevering with medical schooling (CME) at Feinberg?
Schroedl: There are a number of priorities. First is concentrate on team-based schooling. Healthcare is evolving in such a method that we’re not in isolation. We actually have to concentrate on team-based schooling and creating actions to deal with studying wants of the entire workforce. Second is expertise. How can we take all this wonderful new expertise and use it to our benefit inside schooling to assist make studying extra environment friendly and related?
It’s attention-grabbing, inside tutorial drugs, we concentrate on the educational wants of our medical college students and trainees. And but we even have so many college who’ve ongoing studying wants that span their whole profession. It’s necessary to consider alternatives for these learners.
And the wants change, proper? We should keep present not simply with new ailments or remedies, but in addition the flexibility to navigate the complicated evolving well being system. It’s particularly difficult as a result of as soon as coaching is full, there’s a lot much less time for devoted studying.
Creating schooling that meets the wants of this actually extensive and various group of individuals is what we have to attempt for.
Bregger: I believe one factor that pursuits me longitudinally is utilizing expertise to assist individuals adapt CME into their life-style. One chance could possibly be creating an app with interactive modules that may enable college to do quick actions on their cellphone whereas ready for an elevator trip as a substitute of attending a convention and getting all their CME in bulk.
One factor Dr. Marianne Inexperienced talked about that I discovered fascinating is the usage of synthetic intelligence to establish academic gaps or relevant medical subjects. For instance, a panel of sufferers coming in over the subsequent month and figuring out widespread medical situations, after which populating CME alternatives geared in direction of optimizing look after these sufferers.
Moreover, there are a lot of high quality or efficiency metrics already being tracked for particular person clinicians. Leveraging this information to establish areas for enchancment after which concentrating on interactive CME in direction of these areas is probably going the longer term. On this method, you possibly can customise CME to the efficiency of a person to make it extra helpful and extra tangible. That’s the place the way forward for CME is perhaps going. I additionally imagine many clinicians are studying via non-traditional means, comparable to utilizing Twitter, Instagram, or podcasts; discovering artistic methods to include CME into issues individuals are already doing is essential. To piggyback off what Dr. Schroedl mentioned, we have to incorporate expertise to optimize efficiency and make CME extra impactful, accessible and approachable.
Are there any CME actions that you just’re particularly captivated with?
Schroedl: Well being Fairness Week, which is organized by Drs. Oluwateniola Brown and Linda Suleiman, is a very nice instance of utilizing CME to succeed in a large breadth of learners. Our college students, McGaw trainees, college, nursing, and hospital administration all profit from this schooling.
Bregger: I’m personally very excited concerning the Ladies in in Medication convention. There are such a lot of subjects which might be pertinent to me as a girl doctor, to assist me really feel empowered and overcome imposter syndrome, and in addition discover ways to community and leverage alternatives.
Schroedl: I believe that these two conferences spotlight a extremely necessary facet of CME, which is creating group round schooling. As learners, we get excited after we get to spend time collectively studying. It’s not nearly gaining new information concerning the subsequent neatest thing in administration of a illness — it’s actually having the ability to spend time with our pals and colleagues that makes CME such a enjoyable and necessary house to be in. The CME workplace actually needs to be a accomplice to those that want to plan schooling.
