A scholar-practitioner: it sounds like a euphemism, perhaps, for a Burke and Hare-style body-snatching amateur surgeon, or perhaps an overly enthusiastic mid-life crisis magician. In reality, though, these hard-working, well-educated professionals serve a massively important function in keeping our medical establishment, and our society, functioning, impactful, relevant, and modern. By coordinating research with the insights of medical practice, scholar-practitioners ensure meaningful and useful knowledge synthesis within the world of care.
Paths to Medicine
It may initially seem overwhelming: how to become something as lofty-sounding as a scholar-practitioner? Most people would be pretty happy with even one of those things. But we need people to become them, and while it is challenging, it is also both possible and rewarding. Even eschewing traditional medical school, there are many ways to become a scholar-practitioner. One could, for instance, take a DNP program online, as a first step along the road into academia. Thence, clinical practice, mentoring, and the pursuit of a PhD. might well leave you in a position ready to consider this rewarding and important career.
Continuous Learning and Research
This is perhaps not as strange an approach to take as it might sound; studies show that nearly three-quarters of Americans consider themselves to be “lifelong learners” in some or other respect, and 63% feel that the same is true specifically in the workplace. Naturally, this takes different forms in different professions. In non-medical workplaces, there are courses to be taken and books to be read, but most people feel that they actually end up learning more on the job, as it were, than in official institutions. Even in medicine, a discipline that requires high levels of formal education and training in both theoretical and practical matters, it would appear that this rings true, at least to a degree. This is partly due to the practical, hands-on nature of medical practice: it is hard to know what to do with your hands (before we even mention a scalpel) just from a book. It is also, though, partly to do with medicine’s basis in the scientific method. For our medical knowledge to expand, it is vitally important that new data be gathered and analysed, new hypotheses formed, and new treatments tested for persistent medical problems, and who could be better placed to conduct this expansion of human collective knowledge than a scholar-practitioner?
Practical Application of Knowledge and Experience
Now, this may sound obvious, but the flipside of scholar-practitioners using their work to inform the cutting edge of academic medicine is that such professionals are, by necessity, well-versed in the very latest medical thinking and most likely trained in the most groundbreaking equipment and techniques. Naturally, I do not in any way say this to denigrate those hardworking members of the medical profession who are not actively conducting research, these, too, are highly-trained professionals who in many cases are so devoted to their patients and to improving the lives of others with the tools already at hand to feel that they have time to spend on academic intellectual production as well. Rather, I say this to reassure those who might be wary or sceptical about their treatment being involved in research, or concerned that being treated by a scholar-practitioner might somehow put them at a disadvantage: in both of these instances, you are being treated by someone who knows what they are doing, is operating within strict and carefully considered regulations, and who has in many cases even sworn variants of the Hippocratic oath, promising to above all else keep you from harm.
The Benefits of Scholar-Practitioners in the Medical Profession
Scholar-practitioners, or “pracademics” as they are sometimes known, play an important role in the generation, dissemination, and verification of medical knowledge. Crucially, they often act as something of an intellectual bridge between reams of complicated research produced by their colleagues working in university settings on very niche, specific issues, and surgeons, too, are swept off their feet to be able to run through the latest findings, treatments, and recommendations.
It is the role of the pracademic, for instance, to distill large volumes of research into practicable takeaways – learning what’s most relevant and most effective (and thus worth verifying and keeping) and passing that on to their colleagues in the practical side of the medical field, while perhaps leaving the less immediately useful (but still highly important) findings within the palaces of the academy, in case they become useful in further knowledge generation down the line.
This role as a “knowledge broker,” however, works both ways. While theory often informs a scholar-practitioner’s practice, they can also be of enormous benefit to the community and humanity by feeding back to research-focused doctors what the community needs academic research to be focused on, what’s prevalent? What’s worrying? What’s under-researched, or under-funded?
In answering these questions, scholar-practitioners take on their most important role, really: as organisers, coordinators, and leaders within the medical community as a holistic being. They are the conduit between theory and practice, innovation and implementation, and the academy and the public. They are, ultimately, of vital importance to the vitality of any large, improving health system.
