2022 STAR Educator Recipient: Rachel Vandermeer, MD
Rachel J. Vandermeer, MD
Assistant Professor
Department of Pediatrics, Division of Complex and Palliative Care
Nomination Submission:
Dr. Rachel Vandermeer is an amazing clinician educator. She has demonstrated excellence in teaching from the pre-medical school level through the fellowship level and interprofessionally. She is very active in the admissions committee and was selected for the executive committee. In this role she helps select the diverse call that is so critical for peer teaching. She serves as the Assistant Clerkship Director for pediatrics where she has had a significant impact. She provides direct classroom teaching for all students in their clerkship year. In addition, she provides feedback on their clinical performance and remediates students that are not meeting clerkship requirements. She has developed a session on QI and Patient Safety that is highly received.
For fourth year medical students she developed an OSCE in pediatric palliative care and presents a large class narrative medicine session that is tremendously engaging. She has presented her work in teaching students at the Shine Academy and at COMSEP, the national association of pediatric clerkship directors. She also developed a curriculum for Palliative Care fellows to teach them pediatric competencies. She has presented this curriculum at national meetings.
Her latest accomplishment was to create an online module on Perinatal Palliative Care for nurses at University Hospital. She plans on adapting this module to teach neonatology fellows as an Educational Scholars project. This word count is not enough to fully describe her impact and how adept she is at adapting teaching to the level of the learner, but I hope that I have described the excellence of he teaching and the quality of her educational products. Most importantly, she is an amazing role model as a clinician and demonstrates the highest levels of professionalism and humanism.