Drs. Garrett and Jauregui publish commentary in Journal of Graduate Medical Education

Drs. Alexander Garrett and Joshua Jauregui co-authored an article recently published in the Journal of Graduate Medical Education. 

The commentary titled, “Beyond Opening Doors: Valuing Community Voices While Rethinking Curricular Design” is featured in Volume 15, Issue 6 of the journal. It discusses how academic medicine can improve to benefit trainees and their patients. 

“The institution of academic medicine has often wielded its exclusivity as a tool to define knowledge for those not traditionally welcomed in through the tower doors,” the authors write. “However, the communities existing outside of the world of academia foster their own collective wisdom.” 

Dr. Jauregui, the Associate Director of the Medical Education Research Fellowship, and Dr.Garrett, a Medical Education Research Fellow, have a vested interest in this discussion. Dr. Jauregui’s research focuses on undergraduate medical education and faculty development with a focus on the learning environment and psychological safety. Dr. Garrett studies the experiences of students who are underrepresented in medicine, to create a more equitable medical education system. 

The commentary notes that “if academic medicine exists, at least in part, to equip trainees to provide the best care they can, then it is necessary to consider every voice that could enrich our understanding of what that best care could look like.” 

Drs. Jauregui and Garrett emphasize that if the physician’s goal is the health of their patients, then medical training must seek to include patient and community understandings of health and provide trainees with the skills to negotiate shared meanings of health with their patients. 

You can read the full article here in the Journal of Graduate Medical Education.