'To teach or not to teach?' Factors that motivate and constrain Australian emergency medicine physicians to teach medical students.

OBJECTIVE

Clinical teaching in the ED is crucial to the education of medical students. We attempted to identify and describe Australian emergency physicians who are currently clinical teachers and to elicit the factors that motivate and constrain them to teach.

METHODS

An online survey was emailed to all Advanced Trainee and Emergency Physician (Fellow) members of the ACEM.

RESULTS

Our response rate was 28%. The 639 survey respondents were broadly representative of the total ACEM membership in level of training, gender and geographic distribution across all Australian states and territories. Although only 30% of survey respondents had a university teaching position, 74% were actively teaching medical students. Ninety per cent of all respondents agreed they would either commence teaching or increase the amount of time they contributed if they had protected teaching time. Other important facilitators were feelings of personal satisfaction and receiving continuing medical education credits. Written comments were received from 162 respondents. Qualitative analysis identified three main themes: personal, systemic and university-related factors. Systemic and university factors were most frequently cited as barriers to teaching, whereas personal factors were motivators.

CONCLUSIONS

Although most emergency physicians are willing to teach, systemic and university factors associated with teaching medical students acted against success of this outcome.