Qualities of Excellent Clinical Teachers: An Empirical Study Based on Frontline Clinical Teachers

  Objective  Teachers' instructional ability is an important guarantee for the quality of instruction. With the continuous enrichment of the content of medical education, there arises an urgent need to strengthen theoretical research on the instructional competence of teachers of clinical courses.

  Methods  Based on the grounded theory approach, we explored the constituent elements of clinical teachers' instructional competence through conducting in-depth interviews with 16 outstanding clinical medical teachers.

  Results  By progressively encoding the original sentences, 97 codes, 33 concepts, and 11 categories were obtained, and ultimately 5 main categories of teaching competence of clinical teachers were derived—motivation, knowledge, ability, personal character, and development.

  Conclusion  Instructional competence is the continuous accumulation of knowledge and ability, as driven by development and supported by strong motivation and personal character. Improvements in instructional competence require not only the efforts by teachers themselves, but also a wide variety of institutional and policy support.