Welcome to my MED-TED talk
A new competition aims to find the next generation of great SHM presenters.
Hospitalists from around the country will come together for a new competition at SHM Converge 2024 that aims to shine a spotlight on the next generation of presenters.
Christopher Whinney, MD, FACP, SFHM, chair of the department of hospital medicine at the Cleveland Clinic Foundation, said the idea had its genesis in a venue familiar to hospitalists: the chalk talk.
“Traditional teaching on the wards often involved the staff physician getting the chalk out and teaching by drawing didactics or running through a case. They would write on the board so that people would have the visual memory of that,” he said. “We wanted to do some kind of chalk talk competition.”
So Saturday’s MED-TED Teaching Competition was born. Eight competitors from across the country were selected with the criteria that they had never presented at a national meeting and were within five years of their residency or graduation.
The talks will be no more than 8 minutes in length and must include a visual presentation in the form of PowerPoint. Presenters were selected based on the strength of their submitted abstract for their proposed presentation, its relevance to hospital medicine, innovation and conciseness.
Dr. Whinney, who organized the competition along with Joseph Sweigart, MD, SFHM, head of the SHM Education Committee; Annie Massart, MD, SFHM, SHM Annual Conference Committee member; and Dan Steinberg, MD, FACP, SFHM, professor of medical education at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, said limiting the length of the talks is one of the things that makes this competition unique.
“It’s harder to do a short talk than it is to do a longer talk, so that’s part of the magic of really cultivating it as a TED Talk — how can you distill down your key message and do it in 8 minutes or less?” he said.
Speakers are from a mix of academic and community medical centers. Dr. Whinney said the judges tried to choose a variety of topics.
“The content will be a lot of clinically relevant conditions — much like you might deliver in a chalk talk or when you talk to students and residents on the wards, including pain management, conditions like pancreatitis, and physical diagnosis,” he said. “It’ll be a great diversity of clinical talks.”
In addition to providing attendees with interesting talks on a variety of topics relevant to hospital medicine, Dr. Whinney said the competition will address an issue Converge organizers have faced for years.
“One of the challenges we find is finding new talent and new speakers of the younger generation of hospitalists coming through,” he said. “There’s a lot of great talent out there so we’re always looking for ways to identify it.”
Besides the speakers, Dr. Whinney said he is also hoping the competition will bring out their friends, colleagues and — perhaps most importantly — their mentors to offer their support.
“We’re going to see folks who maybe haven’t had the opportunity to step on stage. There’s nothing more inspiring than when you as a mentor see one of your mentees on the big stage and succeeding in delivering a big talk,” he said. “We think that will be very meaningful to both the mentors and mentees. We hope that’s the kind of sentiment that it will facilitate and will find new talent for these future meetings.”
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