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Coaching and communication in medical education: Institute of Medicine Spring Symposium 2025
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Coaching and communication in medical education: Institute of Medicine Spring Symposium 2025

The Institute of Medicine Spring Symposium, held on 23 January at No. 6 Kildare Street, focused on coaching and communication in medical education. With engaging talks from experts, the symposium highlighted the importance of coaching and the nuances of virtual communication. 

Dr Maya Hammoud, Professor of Obstetrics and Gynecology and Learning Health Sciences, University of Michigan Medical School and Senior Advisor, American Medical Association, delivered an insightful talk on coaching in medical education. She defined coaching and differentiated it from advising, mentoring, and other traditional faculty roles, emphasising that coaching is not about giving direct answers but about helping individuals uncover their own goals and pathways. Dr Hammoud stressed the importance of coaching with compassion rather than coaching for compliance, highlighting a fundamental shift in medical training. She outlined a strength-based coaching approach. 

The symposium also tackled the challenges of virtual communication, with Ms Claire Doole, Communications Trainer and Conference Moderator, sharing her expertise on engaging audiences effectively over Zoom. Ms Doole highlighted common difficulties in virtual presentations such as passive audiences, lack of non-verbal cues, technical issues, and time management difficulties. She emphasised the importance of establishing an effective virtual presence by enhancing three key channels of communication: visual, vocal and verbal. Ms Doole also outlined key principles for making messages stick: keeping them simple, unexpected, credible, concrete, emotional, and story-driven.  

The symposium concluded with updates from the Institute. Prof Edward McKone spoke about the Irish Clinician Educator Training (ICET) Programme, followed by reflections on traning from Dr Jeffrey Harte, 4th-year Specialist Registrar in Infectious Diseases and GIM and Dr Karen Dennehy, 4th-year Geriatric Specialist Registrar. 

The ICET programme is an innovative, advanced, educational pathway in the field of Postgraduate Clinical Education. It is a two-year National Programme developed to provide training in Postgraduate Clinical Education and it is open to Specialist Registrars who can undertake it as Out of Clinical Programme Experience (OCPE) in alignment with RCPI regulation for OCPE.

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