CHARGED with rethinking how medicine should be taught amid rapid shifts in technology, workload, and student well-being, two physicians from the Faculty of Medicine and Surgery used their professorial chair lecture to confront the values reshaping medical education.
Dr. Eva Irene Maglonzo and Dr. Remedios Chan were conferred the Doña Victoria Ty Tan Professorial Chair in Medical Education, becoming the first honorees to receive the award through an interactive debate instead of a traditional scholarly lecture.
This year’s theme, “Provocations in Practice: Rethinking How We Teach Medicine,” framed the conversation.
In previous years, recipients delivered a single, formal lecture. Maglonzo noted that this year departed from that pattern.
Instead of presenting research, the awardees were tasked to debate five predetermined themes, choosing their assigned sides “upon agreement” and preparing arguments, rebuttals, and counter-rebuttals based on those positions.
Chan, a pediatric nephrologist, and Maglonzo, a family medicine physician, squared off on five “tensions” at the heart of medical formation: tradition vs. transformation, compassion vs. competence, grades vs. grit, workload vs. wellness, and burnout vs. breakthrough.
Tradition vs. transformation
Opening the discussion, Chan underscored that tradition remains the grounding force of medical teaching, citing reformers such as Abraham Flexner, whose 1910 report established scientific standards in medical schools, and William Osler, the “Father of Modern Medicine” who pioneered bedside teaching.
“Tradition in its true sense is not about clinging to outdated methods or resisting progress. It is about honoring the principles that give education its soul,” Chan said.
Chan drew from ritual practices in other institutions, such as Tzu Chi University’s “silent mentor” program, where body donors are honored as teachers, and parallel traditions in UST, where Masses open and close the academic year to express gratitude before cadavers are interred.
These are “educational anchors” that shape empathy and moral grounding, she said.
Maglonzo countered that transformation must guide institutions through rapidly changing clinical and educational realities.
“Medicine is rooted in tradition, but every tradition we revere today was once a transformation. Tradition gives medicine its heart, but transformation gives it its pulse.”
Citing meta-analyses on simulation-based learning, problem-based learning, and technology-enhanced instruction, Maglonzo emphasized that these approaches now outperform many traditional methods.
In her rebuttal, she reminded the audience that even the reforms Chan celebrated “were born not from preservation, but from transformation.”
Compassion vs. competence
In the second exchange, Maglonzo underscored that competence, defined by skill, precision, and clinical judgment, must remain medicine’s foundation.
“True care for patients begins with knowing what you’re doing. Those moments demand training, precision, and knowledge, the hallmarks of competence,” she said, referencing studies linking diagnostic errors to preventable deaths.
Chan responded that medicine was never intended to be a “cold science” of precision alone.
“A surgeon may hold a scalpel with perfect steadiness, but without compassion, may forget that beneath every incision lies a person, not just a procedure,” she said.
Drawing from humanistic training models, including the silent mentor program and empathy-centered curricula, Chan argued that compassion is a clinical skill that strengthens patient care and prevents burnout.
Grades vs. grit
Chan opened the third theme by defending grades as necessary benchmarks throughout medical education, from admission to residency.
“Grades teach students to face feedback, not flee from it, to see assessment not as judgment, but as guidance,” she said, citing Objective Structured Clinical Examinations or OSCEs, clerkship grades, and studies linking performance with later clinical competence.
Maglonzo emphasized that while grades measure knowledge, they cannot measure the qualities that sustain a medical vocation.
“Grades can measure knowledge, but they cannot measure courage. They cannot measure the ability to comfort a grieving family or the resilience needed to fight for a patient’s treatment,” Maglonzo said.
Workload vs. wellness
The debate then turned to the relationship between workload and student well-being.
“You can teach resilience through comfort. You build it through responsibility, through pressure that matters,” Maglonzo said.
Chan countered that wellness must be institutionalized, not improvised.
“Wellness is collective,” she said. “It’s not about teaching students to survive a broken system; it’s about creating systems worth surviving. When we glorify relentless work, we mistake endurance for excellence and suffering for strength.”
She pointed to studies showing that burnout increases the likelihood of medical errors and that structured wellness programs can reduce burnout by up to 30 percent.
Maglonzo responded that deliberately reducing workload risks minimizing opportunities for “extended purposeful practice,” which she described as essential for producing skilled clinicians.
Burnout vs. breakthrough
In the final exchange, Chan framed burnout as a sign of deeper structural problems.
“Let’s not dismiss burnout as a failure of individuals, but embrace it as a feedback from a system ready for reform, because burnout is not the end of the story. It is the beginning of transformation,” she said.
Maglonzo emphasized that the future of medical education demands breakthrough-oriented models that reengineer learning to be efficient, adaptive, and humane, emphasizing self-regulation, adaptability, and reflective practice.
“We shouldn’t have to suffer to learn, because the future of medicine will not be written by those who burn out, but by those who break through,” she said.
Chan countered that breakthroughs often emerge precisely because burnout “spoke first,” pointing to literature that traces the development of resilience and adaptability models to long-term burnout research.
About the professorial chair
Established in 2019 by the Metrobank Foundation, Inc., the Doña Victoria Ty Tan Professorial Chair in Medical Education supports innovative approaches to medical teaching.
In partnership with the UST Research and Endowment Foundation, Inc., the program provides five-year research grants to educators and researchers from the Faculty of Medicine and Surgery and UST Hospital.
The award is named after Doña Victoria Ty Tan, mother of Metrobank founder Dr. George Ty, who received the Doctor of Humanities honoris causa from the University in 2014.
The conferment was held on Nov. 6 at the Dr. George S.K. Ty Hall of the Buenaventura Garcia Paredes, O.P. Building. With reports from Mary Dawn S. Santos
