Evaluating clinicians’ teaching performance

The focus of this thesis is evaluations of clinicians’ teaching performance in postgraduate medical education in the Netherlands. More specifically we studied formative evaluations, which clinicians use to generate a critical appraisal of their performance for their personal development. Research that was conducted during the last two decades revealed that humans are probably predisposed to being poor at unguided self-generated evaluations of their own performance. Therefore, the availability of structured, valid and reliable external performance data is essential for clinicians to evaluate their performance as clinical teachers. Because such external performance data are often not naturally and easily available for clinicians, we developed the System for Evaluation of Teaching Qualities (SETQ) to generate such data and report it back in a structured feedback report to clinicians. In the SETQ, trainees provide clinicians with feedback on their teaching performance and besides, clinicians self-evaluate their teaching performance. To summarize our findings, we found that the SETQ tools appear to be valid and reliable for gathering clinicians’ teaching performance data from trainees and clinicians’ self-evaluation data. After two evaluation cycles that included gathering performance data, reporting that data to clinicians and an individualized follow-up, clinician teachers enhanced their performance scores. Also, trainees indicated that clinicians improved their overall teaching performance after the first, and even more after a second evaluation cycle. Considering the positive effect that an evaluation system like the SETQ can have on the quality of teaching, it is likely that the quality of patient care will be benefited as well.