SUMMARYThe patient is at the center of clinical medicine. In order to effectively teach clinical skills a teacher must learn to involve patients in the educational process. It is through this process that learners acquire the skills of observation, communication, examination and professionalism. Despite the importance of teaching with the patient present, many clinical teachers are hesitant to teach at the bedside. This paper describes a workshop on bedside teaching. The authors present barriers and advantages discussed during the workshop as well as a 'Model of Best Bedside Teaching Practices', which emerged after conducting the workshop for over 135 medical educators. The model includes suggested skills for effective bedside teaching that are arranged into three domains: attending to patient comfort, focused teaching and group dynamics.

Medical educators have a responsibility to teach students to communicate effectively, yet ways to accomplish this are not well-defined. Sixty-five percent of medical schools teach communication skills, usually in the preclinical years; however, communication skills learned in the preclinical years may decline by graduation. To address these problems the New York University School of Medicine, Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine, and the University of Massachusetts Medical School collaborated to develop, establish, and evaluate a comprehensive communication skills curriculum. This work was funded by the Josiah P. Macy, Jr. Foundation and is therefore referred to as the Macy Initiative in Health Communication. The three schools use a variety of methods to teach third-year students in each school a set of effective clinical communication skills. In a controlled trial this cross-institutional curriculum project proved effective in improving communication skills of third-year students as measured by a comprehensive, multistation, objective structured clinical examination. In this paper the authors describe the development of this unique, collaborative initiative. Grounded in a three-school consensus on the core skills and critical components of a communication skills curriculum, this article illustrates how each school tailored the curriculum to its own needs. In addition, the authors discuss the lessons learned from conducting this collaborative project, which may provide guidance to others seeking to establish effective cross-disciplinary skills curricula.