Simon Liebling, MD

I wanted to take a moment to share some of what I’ve been writing about over the last week or so!

Over on Substack, I’ve been working on a series evaluating how residency case conference has gone wrong and what residencies can do to revive its usefulness and popularity.

• In the first part of the series, I write about how our commitment to hour-long conferences–which have become the default length for just about every medical education activity–leads to conferences that are too long for adult learners–especially busy residents–to focus on. If we are serious about drawing people back to conference–and making it worth their while–we need to embrace shorter conferences, ideally 30 minutes or less.

• In the second part of the series, I focus on how our effort to cover a fresh case in every conference leads us to cram in entirely too much information for any one person to remember. Instead, we should think about dividing cases across multiple, shorter conferences (sound familiar?) to make each day more memorable, allow time for review, and tell a multi-day story that keeps residents coming back.

On Medium, I’ve been focusing recently on the intersection of medicine and Jewish life.

• I shared one of my favorite stories from Jewish and medical history, involving one of my favorite cities. When Jewish families across Europe were expelled from their homes during a period of widespread antisemitism in the Middle Ages, the Italian city of Ferrara opened its doors to them, largely in an effort to recruit renowned Jewish doctors. The community they built survived for centuries as one of Italy’s most enduring centers of Jewish life.

• On a more somber note, I wrote about how medical training taught me just how widespread antisemitism and anti-medical conspiracy theories have become.

I’ll be writing more in the next few days on both Substack and Medium about improving residency case conference and about addressing the dual scourge of antisemitism and conspiratorial thinking.