Just like technical expertise, expert caring can be taught and deliberately practiced. As educators, we must study it, measure it, and build consensus on an ideal framework. And above all, we must value it, not only in medical students and doctors, but in everyone.

Bonnie M. Miller, professor of medical education and administration at Vanderbilt University School of Medicine in Nashville, Tennessee and senior director of scholarly communications at the Kern National Network for Caring and Character in Medicine in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, reflects on the significance of caring, and how it is just as important to doctoring as procedural knowledge and skills.

The essay read in this episode was published in the Teaching and Learning Moments column in the August 2021 issue of Academic Medicine. Read the essay at academicmedicine.org.