Our Facilities & Services
Sydney Adventist Hospital is a Teaching Hospital
What is a "Teaching Hospital"?
A Teaching Hospital is a hospital that has made a major commitment to the education and training of health professionals and a major commitment to medical research through affiliation with major tertiary education institutions. Within a teaching hospital are ‘schools’ with dedicated professional and academic staff. At the San we also have a purpose-built stand-alone Clinical Education Centre (CEC) with state-of-the-art facilities including the Simulation Learning Centre that allows a real-life, hands-on training experience. The CEC is a shared facility, and is home the Sydney Adventist Hospital Clinical School (SAHCS) and Avondale College of Higher Education. It has also become the focus for many of the Hospital’s education, training and outreach activities.
What does this mean for patients and staff?
It has long been recognised that teaching hospitals deliver the highest quality clinical care because the teaching and research environment encourages excellence, collegiality, innovation and a high level of personal and institutional accountability. Teaching hospitals attract the best clinicians, educators and researchers.
On a day-to-day basis this means that medical students are on the wards and in the operating theatres, the Delivery Suite, and in AMO Clinics – in short, everywhere! You may see them alongside nursing students, and students in many other clinical professions, such as physiotherapy and pharmacy. Medical students in their first years of training spend a few days a week at the Hospital as they learn to interact with patients, developing the clinical skills of communication, history taking and physical examination. They are also strongly encouraged to spend time on the wards working with the nursing staff and visiting patients independently, as they come to realise that our Hospital is a 168-hour per week opportunity for them to learn, heal and in turn teach.
The Hospital’s research activity means that patients may be involved in a variety of research activities including clinical trials (which is how, for example, new cancer treatments are tested and adopted), innovative techniques and quality assurance projects. All research activities here have to be approved by a formally constituted Ethics Committee.
Since the days of Hippocrates (and possibly well before) doctors and other health professionals have accepted the responsibility and honour of teaching those who are following behind them. This "on the job" education is a vital part of the training of the next generation of doctors. As Sir William Osler, one of the founders of modern medicine including the system of interns, residents and registrars, wrote "To study the phenomenon of disease without books is to sail an uncharted sea, while to study books without patients is not to go to sea at all." Osler understood the whole of our mission, saying during an address at Johns Hopkins Hospital (one of the most famous teaching hospitals in the world which he co-founded) "The trained nurse has become one of the great blessings of humanity, taking a place beside the physician and the priest, and not inferior to either in her mission."
Please welcome all our students when you see them around our Hospital!
