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Bringing meaning to coaching in medical education

What is a medical coach, and what does he or she do? Even an in-depth analysis of the literature struggles to generate a unified definition. Coaching has been posited as a technique to improve hands-on skills in the operating room, nontechnical skills such as patient communication, leadership and team-working, and even physician well-being. The evidence base is modest, but growing. However, a shared and agreed definition has proved elusive, and it has become evident in my own research that when medical teachers discuss ‘coaching’ we are not always talking about the same thing. In the Venn diagram of ‘teaching’, ‘mentoring’ and ‘giving feedback’, there seems to be enough overlap to cause confusion. Is coaching found at the intersection of these three activities, or perhaps it is something else entirely? If medical educators want to have meaningful discourse about the merits and potential of coaching in medicine, we must know what, precisely, we are discussing.