Hospitals Show How to Accelerate Learning

In the summer of 2005, Judy Rosenblum, then president of Duke Corporate Education (Duke CE), a unit of Duke University specializing in custom executive education, began to consider the learning environment in teaching hospitals and its transferability to the modern corporation. Parallels between hospitals and corporations — fast-paced technological advances, the rapid and constant influx of new information and regulation, long hours, persistent stress and a strong pressure on employees to perform, compounded by economic pressure and high risk — spurred Rosenblum to gather a task force to dig deeper into the hospital environment. She hypothesized that the learning-at-work model employed by teaching hospitals could provide insight and help in accelerating learning in a corporate setting.

In an effort to learn more about the teaching hospital learning model and test its transferability, a team at Duke CE undertook a two-year study of the culture and practices of the country’s best teaching hospitals as recognized by U.S. News & World Report in 2005. Subjects included Mount Sinai Hospital in Manhattan, the Cleveland Clinic, Washington Hospital Center in Washington, D.C., and Johns Hopkins Hospital. Visits to every hospital, combined with the comments of an advisory board comprised of doctors from each of the institutions, yielded an abundance of information on how students and doctors learn, as well as many ideas about how these routines and practices could be transferred to the corporate realm.

The Value of Values
In each hospital Duke visited, it discovered a robust set of core values guiding teaching and learning. These values form the foundation of each hospital’s learning environment and manifest themselves through unique educational processes and learning methods.

First, and perhaps most importantly, teaching and learning are cornerstone values of these organizations and are espoused and modeled by leaders at every level of the organizational hierarchy. According to Dr. Charles Wiener, director of the Osler Medical Training Program at Johns Hopkins Hospital, everyone in the hospital is expected to teach, and all are required to learn. In other words, he reflected, “The learners are the teachers.” Similarly, as one attending physician at Mount Sinai Hospital noted, “The most important thing a medical or science student can learn is how to continue learning.”