Anna Oswald

Contact

Professor, Faculty of Medicine & Dentistry - Medicine Dept

Email: oswald@ualberta.ca
Phone: (780) 492-7500

Overview

Area of Study / Keywords

About

Personal Statement:

My passion is to make our education system as robust and evidence-based as possible, so that trainees become not just doctors, but great clinicians for their whole lives. I hold the PGME Office tagline, “Every Resident, a physician for my family” close to my heart. Much of my current focus is on developing, delivering and assessing competency-based learning approaches that help learners achieve professional excellence. I am involved in national strategies to revise the medical curriculum through the Competence by Design initiative launched by the Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons of Canada.

Dr. Anna Oswald is an award-winning medical education leader. She graduated from the University of Alberta’s medical school and completed an internal medicine residency at Dalhousie University, followed by rheumatology subspecialty training in Edmonton. After completing a year as a visiting research scholar at McGill’s Centre for Medical Education, she obtained a Master’s degree in medical education at the University of Dundee. She joined the Division of Rheumatology in 2007.

Leadership and Collaborations:

Dr. Oswald is the recipient of more than a dozen prestigious teaching awards including the University of Alberta’s Rutherford Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching in 2016, the Canadian Association of Medical Education (CAME) Certificate of Merit Award in 2011 and the Canadian Rheumatology Association Distinguished Teacher-Educator Award in 2018. She has received half a dozen Teacher of the Year, Teaching Excellence and Discovery Learning teaching awards from the U of A Medical Students; Association. She completed the University of Alberta’s Gold College leadership course in 2018. In 2019, she received the Stephen Aaron Teacher of the Year Award from the Division of Rheumatology and the Department of Medicine’s Medical Education Publication Award.

Dr. Oswald’s deep interest in medical education is reflected in her active and long-standing participation on numerous committees engaged in medical education improvement at the university, national and international level.

Selected leadership roles within the University of Alberta include director of Competence Based Medical Education for the Faculty of Medicine & Dentistry and co-coordinator of the Master’s in Health Professions Education (MHPE) Curriculum Design Course Committee, and membership on the MHPE courses’ Instructors Committee, for the Faculty of Education. She was the elected faculty representative on the Faculty of Medicine & Dentistry’s 2019 Dean Selection Committee struck by the Provost’s Office. Within the Department of Medicine, she is a member of the Academic Careers of Women Subcommittee, the Academic Evaluation Committee and the Resident Research Committee, among others.
Current national leadership roles include CanMEDS clinical educator for the Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons of Canada (RCPSC) and University of Alberta representative on the National Competence Based Medical Education Leads Working Group.

She is an active member of the International Competency Based Medical Education (ICBME) Collaborators Collaborative (ICBME). Former international leadership roles include membership on the International Conference in Residency Education Program Advisory Board and on the Best Evidence in Medical Education Collaboration user groups and previous congress.

Clinical Interests

Dr. Oswald is fulltime medical staff in rheumatology at the University of Alberta Hospital with clinical interests in a broad range of general rheumatology.

Research

Dr. Oswald is a widely published medical education and clinical researcher whose work has garnered institutional and national funding, including most recently the RCPSC’s Intramural Research Operating Grant and the University of Alberta’s Teaching & Learning Enhancement Fund operating grant. Project topics range from supportive strategies for student learning to patient-oriented education and goal orientation of learners in medicine to perceptions of feedback in workplace-based training. She has published as lead author or co-author in many peer-reviewed journals including Medical Teacher, Medical Education, Advances in Health Sciences Education, Educational Research and Reviews, Education for Health and Journal of Rheumatology. Her work as one of the ICBME Collaboration members has resulted in several publications for the organization. In her role as RCPSC CanMEDS clinician educator, she has written several book chapters and books on CanMEDS teaching and assessment strategies and on competence by design. Her key areas of medical education scholarship include:

Evidence based medication education and systematic reviews (five previous Best Evidence in Medical Education publications)
Competency Based Medical Education
Promoting Active learning strategies (TBL, PBL, role play, cadaveric sim etc)
Facilitating transitions in training (classroom to clinical training, Undergrad to post grad, post grad to independent practice).

Teaching

Dr. Oswald teaches all levels of trainees from classroom undergraduate medical courses to graduate health profession education and postgraduate clinical instruction and supervision. She is active in faculty development, delivering sessions and workshops on a range of topics in rheumatology and medical education. She presents extensively on medical education topics nationally and internationally.

Featured Publications

Do Resident Archetypes Influence the Functioning of Programs of Assessment?

Rich J.V., Cheung W.J., Cooke L., Oswald A., Gauthier S., Hall A.K.

Education Sciences. 2022 May; 12 (5):293 10.3390/educsci12050293

Learner Phenotypes in Competency-Based Medical Education

Mador B., Daniels V.J., Oswald A., Turner S.R.

Medical Science Educator. 2021 December; 31 (6):2061-2064 10.1007/s40670-021-01380-1

9 JOURNAL ARTICLES THAT RESULTED FROM THE WORK A COLLABORATIVE RESEARCH GROUP (THE INTERNATIONAL COMPETENCY BASED MEDICAL EDUCATION COLLABORATORS OF WHICH I AM A MEMBER)

Medical Teacher. 2021 July; na

Diagnosing conflict: Conflicting data, interpersonal conflict, and conflicts of interest in clinical competency committees

Chan T., Oswald A., Hauer K.E., Caretta-Weyer H.A., Nousiainen M.T., Cheung W.J.

Medical Teacher. 2021 July; 43 (7):765-773 10.1080/0142159X.2021.1925101