Increasing Diversity in Canadian Radiology: From the Hiring Process to Needed Active Retention Efforts.

The Canadian Association of Radiologists supports equity, diversity, and inclusion (EDI) in employment. It is imperative that institutions implement recruitment and retention practices to ensure a diverse workforce. This requires considerable attention to each step in the process, including the job posting, candidate search, hiring committee composition, interviews, hiring decision, and retention and promotion. Job postings must be widely distributed and visible to underrepresented groups. The candidate search should be completed by a diverse committee with expertise in EDI. All committee members must complete EDI and anti-bias training and conduct a broad search that ensures underrepresented groups are encouraged to apply. Interviews must be offered to all candidates. The hiring decision must avoid the use of subjective criteria. Recruitment of members of underrepresented groups ensures a diverse workforce, and organizations should commit resources to the retention and promotion of these members. Mentorship programs must be implemented and incentives provided to faculty members to serve as mentors. Transparent guidelines for promotion made universally available on department or institution websites. Recruiting a diverse workforce in Medical Imaging will only be achieved if EDI are central to the organization's goals and strategic plan. All organizational policies, practices, and procedures must be reviewed with an intersectional lens to identify potential gaps, areas for improvement, and areas of strength in the recruitment and retention of members of underrepresented groups.

A novel resident-as-teacher curriculum: the role of experiential learning and coaching.

This article was migrated. The article was marked as recommended. Background: Canadian family medicine residency programs have the challenge of training in a wide breadth of topics and competencies within a two-year program, including training residents to be effective teachers. There has been a gap in knowledge with regards to the most effective method to train residents to teach. We developed, implemented, and evaluated a novel multi-level resident-as-teacher (RAT) coaching curriculum to provide training and authentic experiences for family medicine residents in teaching medical students. Methods: A curriculum centred around multi-level coaching was designed where family medicine faculty members directly observed and provided feedback to family medicine residents teaching small group clinical skills to first and second year medical students. Family medicine residents received didactic training on how to provide effective feedback to students and manage small group dynamics, after reviewing the learning objectives that students were to achieve. This was followed by the authentic small group teaching experiences. A survey was sent out by email to all residents and faculty members who had participated in the RAT curriculum at the end of the 2013-2014 and 2014-2015 academic years. Quantitative survey data were analyzed using descriptive statistics (frequencies, percentages, correlation coefficients (Spearman's rho)). Qualitative analysis was completed through thematic analysis of respondents' written comments to open-ended survey questions. Results: 80% of 127 residents strongly agreed (26%) or agreed (54%) that the RAT program effectively developed their teaching skills. 57% either strongly agreed (17%) or agreed (40%) that the direct observation and feedback from faculty coaches helped to improve their teaching skills. There was a significant positive correlation between residents' perceptions of the usefulness of the feedback from faculty coaches and residents' perceptions of the overall RAT program's effectiveness in developing their teaching skills (r=0.42; p=0.001). Qualitative analysis revealed that residents perceived the RAT program to have solidified their own knowledge base for the content covered in the sessions. Residents also perceived a benefit of near-peer teaching for the medical students and an elevated family physicians' profile as teachers. They found the active learning experience increased their self-awareness of their teaching skills. Time away from clinical rotations and preparation time were derived as a potential drawback of the program. All faculty coaches agreed or strongly agreed that the RAT curriculum improved the teaching skills of family medicine residents. Thematic analysis of the faculty coaches' comments revealed that participating as coaches allowed for their own professional development in that their feedback and coaching skills improved. Conclusions: Our experiences and program evaluation of a novel multi-level resident-as-teacher coaching curriculum show that direct observation with feedback of authentic teaching activities is highly valued, and appears to be effective in developing resident teaching skills while fostering interest in future teaching.