Roger Bedimo, MD, Professor of Medicine, UT Southwestern Medical Center
Roger Bedimo, MD was the Fellowship Program Director at the University of Texas Southwestern medical center in Dallas for a decade. Helping Infectious Diseases Fellows and Internal Medicine Residents navigate the often steep learning curve and nurturing their passion and drive for the profession has always been very rewarding for him. He now enjoys mentoring ID Fellows and Medicine Residents on clinical rotations and for their scholarly activities. This is one of the highlights of his career.
I stumbled into medical education when I was selected to be Chief Resident. I relished the opportunity to organize Morning Reports and other educational activities for my peers. I didn't realize it at the time, but this prepared me to become the ID Fellowship Program Director a few years later at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center.
From the very beginning, my career in medicine has involved medical education. As a Chief resident, I realized that teaching was the best form of learning. I have then learned from my mentors during ID Fellowship that patient care, education, and research really cannot be pulled apart. They are three interconnected pillars of a full career in medicine. My daily clinical practice now involves mentoring Medicine Residents and Fellows during their clinical rotations, and I expose them to my research activities. What I tell my trainees is that they should never discharge a patient from the hospital without learning something from him/her. Pushing us to learn about a specific condition they came with is the currency the patient pays for us taking good care of them.
Medical Education became part of my career ever since I was selected Chief Resident. This was followed by my nomination as Fellowship Program Director. As that role was a substantial proportion of my function at the University, it became a pillar and driver of my professional development.
My message to Internal Medicine residents applying to join our Infectious Diseases Fellowship program has routinely incorporated a message to them that what a Program Director like me seeks to see in applicants is that they have the three necessary and sufficient ingredients for success: a solid background, a focus on what they want to achieve, and the drive to achieve it. If they have these and don't succeed, we failed them. Many of my trainees have become educators: two of my former ID Fellows are respectively our current ID Fellowship Program Director and our current HIV Fellowship Program Director.
Without a doubt, the most rewarding aspect of my career as an educator is seeing my former trainees thrive as educators and academic ID physicians.