The launch of our inaugural LMP Education Strategic Plan marks an exciting time for TeamLMP. It is the culmination of a year of collaborative work to establish our needs in education, determine our priorities and vision for the future, and to pull this all together in an ambitious but feasible set of goals for education in our department.
This work is sponsored by the LMP Education Task Force (ETF) led by Caitlin Gillan and Dr Carmen Avila-Casado, with the support of our Education Coordinator, Niveda Illandiraiyan, and will serve as our mandate over the next three years.
The Plan Vision is aligned with that of overarching UHN, focused on leveraging Teaching and Learning to advance Medical Laboratory Sciences for A Healthier World, with a Mission to drive collaborative, innovative, and adaptable education by leveraging clinical and research excellence. In this sense, Education is bigger than the work we do in teaching our students and trainees. It includes access to education resources and opportunities for them as well as for our staff, and the structures necessary to keep the broader education machine humming!
Our strategic continuum thus includes 4 main pillars – Teaching, Learning, Collaboration, and Structures & Resources. Each of these has a set of specific goals under it. First glance at these goals might suggest that they are not tangible – that it is hard to appreciate what success might look like for each of them. The intent is that under each of these goals, ETF will track a number of specific projects; things that we define and lead ourselves that might have value across divisions or trainee groups. Others will be led by individual champions who may be part of the broader LMP community, logged as contributions to the overall education mandate.
Some examples of specific projects already underway (or even launched!):
- Establishment of the LMP CPD Radar to provide regular eBlast communications about upcoming courses and conferences that might be of relevant to TeamLMP
- Expanding our ability to support more Michener MLT students to build future capacity in the system; doubling our MLT student cohort in September 2022
- Collecting an inventory of all educational and research rounds hosted across LMP, in order to support broader accessibility to these forums
- Empowering young staff, fellows and other learners through formal Mentorship Programs
- Providing the best training opportunities onsite and establishing international networks for education opportunities with other academic societies
- Developing focused leadership resources and programming for MLPs looking to equip themselves for future opportunities in supporting LMP – new initiative to be announced during National Medical Laboratory Week in April!
The hope is that this Plan will resonate with everyone across TeamLMP, and that we can all both appreciate our role in achieving the Plan and also anticipate where we can get benefit from it. Please reach out to us if you would like to know more or to take an active role in advancing our Plan goals!
Caitlin, Dr Avila Casado, & Niveda
The Pathology Report 
Leave a Reply