Rita M. Patel, MD, FASA

Dr. Patel, an obstetric anesthesiologist and educator, is a national leader in graduate medical education (GME) and has been working with medical student, residency, fellowship, and continuing medical education programs at the University of Pittsburgh since 1984.

In our department, she served as Vice-Chair for Education for 15 years and as Residency Program Director for seven. She established the administrative structure that supports our educational mission, including the use of subcommittees to address common issues in all programs: Recruitment and Selection, Clinical and Didactic Curriculum, Evaluation and Competence, and Program Review. She was honored by the Society for Education in Anesthesia with the Duke Award, which is given to an individual who the Society believes had made significant contributions to advancing anesthesiology education.

Dr. Patel has been invited to present at national meetings, delivering numerous lectures, such as: Best Practices in Faculty Development; Training Residents in the Management of Critical Events Through Simulation; The Challenges of Creating and Implementing Effective CME; Managing Change; Professionalism; Systems Projects; Use of Teaching Portfolios; Clinician-Educator Compensation; Promoting Scholarly Activity; and Creating & Developing the GME Community and Developing Others.

Within the UPSOM, she previously served as course director for the second-year clinical procedures course and as a problem-based learning facilitator for Ethics, Law and Professionalism; Introduction to Medicine; and Clinical Epidemiology and Biostatistics. Dr. Patel is the founding chair of the Teaching Residents to Teach Committee for the UPSOM Academy of Master Educators. She has received the Sheldon Adler Award from the UPSOM for Innovation in Medicine, as well as the Pitt Innovator Award from the University of Pittsburgh.