Twelve tips for turning quality assurance data into undergraduate teaching awards: A quality improvement and student engagement initiative

Data on teaching awards in undergraduate medical education are sparse. The benefits of an awards system may seem obvious at first glance. However, there are also potential problems relating to fairness, avoidance of bias, and alignment of the awards system with a wider strategy for quality improvement and curriculum development. Here, we report five- year single center experience with establishing undergraduate teaching awards in a large academic teaching hospital. Due to lack of additional funding we based our awards not on peer review but mainly on existing and very comprehensive quality assurance (QA) data. Our 12 tips describe practical points but also pitfalls with awards categories and criteria, advertising and disseminating the awards, the actual awards ceremony and finally embedding the awards in the hospital’s wider strategy. To be truly successful, teaching awards and prizes need to be carefully considered, designed and aligned with a wider institutional strategy of rewarding enthusiastic educators.

本科医学教育领域的教学奖项相关数据较为匮乏。乍看之下，教学奖项体系的益处似乎显而易见，但该体系同时存在公平性保障、偏见规避，以及奖项体系与质量改进、课程开发整体战略的契合度等方面的潜在问题。本研究详述了某大型学术教学医院设立本科教学奖项五年来的单中心实践经验。由于缺乏额外经费支持，本次奖项评选未采用同行评议机制，而是主要依托现有且覆盖全面的质量保证（QA）数据开展。本文提出的12条建议，既涵盖奖项类别与评选标准、奖项宣传推广、颁奖典礼等实操要点，也点明了各环节的潜在误区，并最终强调需将奖项体系融入医院的整体发展战略。若要实现教学奖项的真正成功，需对其进行审慎考量与精心设计，并与机构内激励热忱教育工作者的整体战略保持一致。