The process of medical education is rooted in mentorship. In a previous blog entry in Musings, Alexandra Godfrey reminded us of the essential function our mentors have in our development as clinicians and indeed in the process of changing the face of medicine. Every practicing PA can look back and name the people who guided us through our early training in school and through those intense first few years as new graduate PAs. I certainly can't remember the first time I learned from a textbook that the squiggly blip on the ECG actually correlated to the life-sustaining beat of the heart. I do remember the first time I witnessed a patient in the ICU crashing from sinus rhythm to asystole. Even more memorable is the internal medicine resident pointing out the deteriorating QRS complexes as we watched the code team from the back of the room.

As we grow in our medical knowledge and experience, we become those memorable mentors. Winston Churchill succinctly defined this mentorship circle when he said, “We make a living by what we get, we make a life by what we give.” As a clinician, I have enjoyed the opportunity to mentor students in family medicine. Despite the extra portion of chaos that comes with having a student in my busy clinical practice, watching the “ah-hah” moments unfold is always rewarding.

I recently made the leap from full-time clinical practice to PA education. The intensity and frequency of these “ah-hah” moments exploding all around me has been an incredible experience. Nothing has filled me with more joy and pride than the phone call I received from one of my advisees last week. She had been a student in my clinical case study course. In the course, students developed their skills to search and analyze the medical literature to answer clinical questions that improve patient care. I walked them through the process of searching Pub-Med and determining the relevance and validity of the often obscure articles they dug up. As the course progressed, students developed their ability to critically read medical literature and to recognize frequently overstated claims that lack supporting data. As a final project for the course, students answered a clinical question from a patient they had cared for in their clinical preceptorship experience. I offered to mentor any student who wanted to go above and beyond the assignment requirements and prepare their cases in publication format and submit to the student writing competition.

The phone call I received from my student last week was to inform me, to my elation, that her paper was chosen as a winner for the student writing competition. I am excited not only for her success with the competition, but also because maybe … just maybe … my mentorship has helped to plant the seed for a future PA writer. JAAPA

Kris Himmerick is on the faculty of the FNP/PA program at the UC Davis School of Medicine, Sacramento.