Connecting Scholarship to Practice in Health Professions Education

Scholarship in health professions education is often based on paradigms and methodologies unfamiliar to clinician educators. This risks a ‘disconnect’ – where educators may be looking for randomized controlled trials, and scholars are providing theoretical frameworks and thematic analysis!

In this episode, Lara Varpio and Subha Ramani discuss their scholarly work in health professions education and how they have made that work rigorous and useful to practitioners while also educating their readers and challenging some positivist norms.

Lara Varpio is a professor at the Center for Health Professions Education & Department of Medicine and associate director of Research at the Center for Health Professions Education at the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences in Maryland. Subha Ramani is an associate professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School and an internal medicine physician at the Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston. She is a senior faculty member at the Harvard Macy Institute.

We had an interesting discussion on the cultural contexts in which this scholarship is placed and look forward to more ‘bidirectional’ influence of non-Western perspectives on knowledge and ‘ways of knowing.’ Subha and Lara provided excellent advice to those early in their scholarship journey – being clear on goals, engaging in scholarship for the right reasons, and the importance of collaboration. Many thanks to them for their time and expertise!

Victoria Brazil, MD (Educators, ’05, Leaders ’07, Assessment ‘10) is Professor of Emergency Medicine and Director of Simulation at Bond University Faculty of Health Sciences and Medicine. Her research interests include podcasting and simulation, and she is co-producer of Simulcast - a podcast about health care simulation. Victoria can be followed on Twitter.