BOSTON — At a teaching hospital in Yerevan this autumn, a clinical scene that looked entirely routine carried something new. A resident presented a case and reasoned through it aloud with faculty; the group moved together to the bedside to examine the patient; and then, instead of dispersing, they paused to talk — not only about the diagnosis, but about how the case had been taught. What set the moment apart was not the medicine, but the method. The session had been designed, led, and critiqued by Armenian physicians who, a year earlier, had set out to master something their own training had never formally offered them: how to teach medicine at the bedside.
Those physicians are the first graduates of the Master’s of Science in Health Professions Education (MSHPE) program, a partnership between Boston University Chobanian & Avedisian School of Medicine and HENAR Foundation. Delivered through the Boston University – Armenia Medical Partnership (BU-AMP), the program has recently entered a new, practice-based phase, and representatives of Boston University and HENAR traveled to Armenia to see the results firsthand, at the bedside, where they matter most.
The delegation visited several hospitals that serve as clinical bases for the academic departments of Yerevan State Medical University (YSMU) and the National Institute of Health/Armenia (ANIH); Muratsan University Hospital Complex, the Mikaelyan Institute of Surgery, Wigmore Women’s and Children’s Hospital, and Erebuni Medical Center. In each, they watched physician-educators from the program’s first cohort lead clinical teaching sessions alongside faculty they themselves had helped train, proof that the learning had already moved out of the classroom and into daily practice.
The significance of the MSHPE program lies less in any single visit than in what it is quietly rewiring. For generations, medical training in Armenia, as in much of the world, rewarded the transfer of knowledge: what a physician learned in the classroom. This program is helping shift that model toward competency-based medical education, which asks a harder question: what a physician can actually do at the bedside, and how well they can teach the next generation to do it.
“One of the most important impacts of this initiative is that it contributes to a shift in the way we think about teaching. It is not simply about transferring knowledge, but about developing competencies, promoting active learning, strengthening assessment and creating a supportive educational environment,” said Jeffrey Markuns, MD, EdM, executive director of the Boston University Global Health Collaborative and founding director of the MSHPE program at the school.
That shift is designed to spread. Rather than importing foreign experts to deliver care and then depart, the program invests in Armenian physician-educators who become, in effect, multipliers. The first cohort — six physicians selected in partnership with YSMU and ANIH — completed graduate-level training this year at Boston University through a blend of online and in-person study, including a six-week intensive summer session in Boston. But even as they studied, they taught: through local faculty development and “Training of Trainers” sessions every two weeks over the past year, those six passed their new expertise to 171 fellow physician-educators across Armenia’s academic and clinical institutions.
