Patients Recognized for Their Impact on Medical Students Through Legacy Teachers Program

Legacy Teachers™ participants
The Legacy Teachers program offers third-year medical students at the University of Missouri the opportunity to submit essays, artwork or poetry describing a patient they recognized as one of their greatest teachers.

The Legacy Teachers™ Program was celebrated in Columbia and Springfield campuses of the MU School of Medicine. This is the 17th year students have honored Legacy Teachers at the MU School of Medicine in Columbia and the third year for the Springfield clinical campus.

The program culminates in luncheons where Legacy Teachers and their families are honored by the third-year students who nominated them. Leaders, faculty and staff of the school of medicine gather to celebrate.

 “Legacy Teachers have a lasting impact on our students and make them better physicians and people,” said Betsy Garrett, MD, professor emerita in the Department of Family and Community Medicine and director of the Legacy Teachers program. “We hope that our Legacy Teachers and their families are truly honored and touched by the recognition these students made possible.”

Students involved will receive a certificate as well as a Legacy Teacher pin, which was created in 2021 in recognition of the 15th anniversary of the program’s creation.

“We hope they will wear this pin throughout their training and beyond to remind us all that we must never stop learning from our patients, for they have so much to teach us,” Garrett said.

Similar celebrations modeled after the original MU program have been adopted by other medical schools across the country, including the University of Kansas-Wichita, the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, East Carolina University Brody School of Medicine, Tufts University School of Medicine, Tufts-Maine, and the University of South Dakota Sanford School of Medicine.