involvement
Dr. Nicole Didyk explains why she enjoys being an assessor to the physicians who attended Future Leaders’ Day.
“How being involved made me
a better doctor” Future Leaders’ Day attendees hear
why participation in professionally-
photo: D.W. Dorken
“W
e are the College.”
That was the phrase which
resonated for Dr. Nicole Didyk when she heard it spoken
to the group of young doctors attending a Future
Leaders’ Day three years ago.
“When I heard Dr. [Rocco] Gerace say that to us,
it just clicked for me. Yes, we are the College, he was
right,” said Dr. Didyk, a geriatrician from Kitchener.
“And we need to preserve and continue to foster that
privilege [of professionally-led regulation],” she said in
a presentation at this year’s Future Leaders’ Day.
Dr. Didyk does her own part in fostering that privilege by assessing her fellow geriatricians. “I find these
experiences tremendously valuable, to be able to sit
down and have an open on-on-one discussion with a
peer about their practice. I think I get as much back
from the process as those I assess, because I am speaking with people facing the same type of challenges that
I do,” she told the two dozen doctors in attendance.
Dr. Didyk acknowledged that being a peer assessor is
a time commitment, but said that “the time that I take
led regulation matters
to do this absolutely helps and informs my other roles,
including working with medical students,” she said.
The College hosts this event regularly to give doctors the opportunity to see themselves in a leadership
role in medical regulation. The event is designed to
make regulation as real and tangible to the participants
as possible.
“We don’t want to simply give our guests a description of the different roles at the College and rhyme off
a list of the responsibilities that they entailed. We want
to make the experience come alive for them. And we
do this by putting them in the role of our Committee and Council members to give them a sense of the
thorny challenges that sometimes need to be faced,”
said Dr. Rocco Gerace, College Registrar.
The attendees were presented with the facts of past
anonymized complaint cases and asked to deliberate
on an outcome. They also participated in a debate on
a policy that is currently out for consultation – the
Professional Obligations and Human Rights draft,
which has elicited overwhelming feedback in a preliminary consultation.
Issue 4, 2014 Dialogue
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