SUMMARY

What is the anesthesiologist's responsibility in teaching colleagues and other health care professionals? The answer lies in the answers to the many aspects of the following question:

How shall who teach what to whom for what purpose now and in the future?!

For many, however, this type of review of education is "soft" material that lacks the "hard" research data to prove its validity. Perhaps this is true. Perhaps by its very nature (i.e., psychosocial) the science of education has its limits. On the other hand, however, enough experimental studies of education may not have been performed. A model to conduct such studies might view the preceding question in terms of educational outcome analysis ( Fig. 85-2 ). Although the educational setting is not a pure, controlled laboratory environment, accepted quasi-experimental design techniques exist for this naturalistic research setting.^[46]

What then is the anesthesiologist's responsibility in teaching? It is twofold: to understand all aspects of education and then to scientifically study educational outcome so the future students of anesthesiology will be more effectively taught and better prepared as experts in the field.