Just do it: Incorporating bedside teaching into every patient encounter

> He who studies medicine without books sails an uncharted sea, but he who studies medicine without patients does not go to sea at all. > > William Osler Students learn what it means to be a doctor at the bedside. Communication, professionalism, clinical reasoning, and the physical examination are best learned in the presence of patients. In this setting, students are able to make connections and apply what they learned in the classroom to the patient who is with them. In this article, we continue the series by the Council on Medical Student Education in Pediatrics in which the skills and strategies used by great clinical teachers are described. In previous articles, we considered specific strategies to teach family-centered care,1 clinical reasoning,2 and humanism3 at the bedside of patients. In this article, we provide practical tips to help busy clinicians incorporate bedside teaching into inpatient and outpatient care. In our age of time pressures in clinical settings, multitasking, and short attention spans, clinical teachers face a challenging situation: how can they grab and maintain their learners’ focus during patient encounters? The great news is that short clinical teaching at the bedside is likely to captivate students because they have become accustomed to communicating through texts and tweets. We reframe the challenge of “not having time to teach” to finding content for timely teaching; in just a few minutes, great clinical lessons can be taught from every bedside. Experienced clinical teachers consult their patient list in advance and think about short teaching points … Address correspondence to Robert Arthur Dudas, MD, Department of Pediatrics, Johns Hopkins All Children’s Hospital, 601 5th St South, Suite 606, St Petersburg, FL 33701. E-mail: rdudas{at}jhmi.edu