As a faculty member in pharmacy, Dr. Conan MacDougall teaches a preclerkship course in Infectious Diseases and for many years directed ID pharmacy residency. UCSF's strong emphasis on interprofessional education gives him opportunities to work with all their health professions trainees. As an ID pharmacist and steward, he gets the opportunity to work with ID fellows and faculty and providers from every specialty - every clinical discussion is a teaching opportunity. He also helps to lead efforts at a school and university level around incorporating technology in education, particularly with the advent of AI.
How did you get interested in medical education?
I think I started off just being excited about passing along the content - most people like talking about stuff they are passionate about - and then working on becoming a better explainer. But eventually I realized I was just parroting the way I had been taught, and that I didn't really understand the foundations of educational theory and practice. The more I learned, the more I found there was to learn. And so, like many folks in health professions education, I started learning how to really be a teacher years after I had actually started teaching.
How have you integrated medical education into your career?
Health professions ed is really at the center of everything I do. One of the biggest lessons I learned early on was how important it is to understand where your audience is coming from and what they need to get out of a learning encounter. So, I am really intentional now about trying to understand what every group of learners that I interact with - from pharmacy students to ID fellows to surgery interns to NP students - brings into the encounter and what they are hoping to get out of it.
How did you transform your interest in medical education into a career?
Taking advantage of professional development opportunities in education has been key. I was able to be part of the Teaching Scholars Program offered by UCSF's School of Medicine. I took professional development leave to Monash University in Australia to work on projects but mostly just to read med ed articles for a few months. Carving out time to develop as an educator, separate from your clinical roles, is challenging but I think it is really important to develop in med ed.
What is one medical innovation that makes you the most proud?
Learning spectrum of activity is challenging for ID learners, but it's fundamental to building useful schemas in ID. I felt like the mnemonic-based approaches frequently used didn't serve as a strong scaffold for learning, so I created a visual array-based approach that students took to calling "flower diagrams". Now I'll meet learners from pharmacy schools I've never heard of telling me at meetings that they learned ID using flower diagrams.
How have you transformed your medical education work into scholarship?
I think health professions ed scholarship is really challenging. Learners progress through their development quickly, the absolute number of study subjects tends to be low, and because the learning stakes are high - for the learners and ultimately patients - there's a pretty high bar for interventions. I think you have to be opportunistic and look for natural experiments that you can take advantage of, or perform small, focused studies where you can demonstrate that a general principle from education theory holds (or doesn't) for health professions learners. And of course, funding is scarce. Because of these challenges, I think the real path forward comes from multi-institutional and multi-professional collaborations, and I'm excited that IDSA is helping to make this possible.
What are some of the most rewarding aspects of your career as an educator thus far?
First, having trainees who go on to become educator colleagues and collaborators is my biggest highlight. I love to see it when the switch flips and it's not just about passing along knowledge but building learning experiences. Second, I know textbooks are less in fashion but my interest in pharmacy and in ID came from browsing the big textbooks of the day. Even if there was just one pharmacist listed among the chapter authors, it made me feel like that was a path I could follow. Now being able to be an author and section editor for some of those books makes me feel like I'm making that path a little wider for others to follow.