Margaret L Dobson

Margaret Dobson, MD is a highly skilled, compassionate, and focused Family Physician, executive leader, and educator. She is the Director of Primary Care Initiatives at the University of Michigan Medical School where she supports faculty career advising and looks to advance the primary care workforce through bold innovations in medical education and strategic collaborations with partners across the state and nation. Dr. Dobson, an assistant professor, also serves as the Associate Chief of Staff of University Hospital where her team supports professionalism initiatives and peer review and as an Associate Chair for Educational Programs in the Department of Family Medicine. From June 2022 - September 2023 she served as the interim chair for the Department of Family Medicine.

Dr. Dobson remains rooted in her work as a clinician, spending the first 10 years of her clinical life balancing care of patients across the life cycle in her continuity clinic, in home-based care, and while teaching on an inpatient resident service. She no longer rounds in the hospital, but continues with a very busy longitudinal clinical practice at the Chelsea Health Center and precepts residents seeing patients in Chelsea and in Ypsilanti.

Dr. Dobson is a recognized leader in family medicine education, with a strong track record of developing and advancing programs that prepare the next generation of family physicians. Her academic work focuses on curriculum innovation, mentorship, and workforce development, and she has played a key role in national efforts to improve primary care training. Through her leadership, she has helped shape policies and programs that support high-quality, values-driven education and expand opportunities for learners to pursue careers in primary care.

Dr. Dobson has a long-standing interest in coaching physician well-being and professionalism. She has experience using compassion, and reflection as well as structural approaches to improve wellbeing in the workplace. From 2013 to 2018, Dr. Dobson served as Program Director of the U-M Family Medicine Residency Program expanding the cohort of trainees from 11 to 13 residents per year engaging in curriculum redesign informed by UCSF’s "clinic first" transformational programs. From 2018 to 2022, she turned her focus to undergraduate medical education, serving as a clinical educator, and medical student coach, as well as assistant course director for the Doctoring course, where she contributed to the expansion of the Doctoring curriculum to address structural inequities and the social and structural determinants of health and integration of trauma-informed approaches. She led the creation of tailored interventions for students needing additional support.

Dr Margaret Dobson is known institutionally as an exceptionally thoughtful and insightful colleague, who asks and seeks to understand best practices in creating a more just, more robust and more integrated clinical practice. In her work in medical education and leadership, she keeps patients and their families at the core of everything she does. With that in mind she has a particular interest in trauma informed approaches - including trauma informed care, trauma informed pedagogy, and has some work underway to understand the efficacy of faculty development focused on the integration of these two related and important philosophical approaches impacting medical education. She has an interest in interventions to improve clinician wellbeing, including those centered on positive psychology constructs, and those centered on small incremental improvements in the clinical practice environment. She recently piloted group coaching to support mid-career faculty, using integral coaching techniques. She has not explicitly researched professionalism interventions but is curious about how to support trainees and faculty in difficulty, including those facing professionalism concerns. In her intergeneration practice, she is engaged in best practices to support "grandparenting" as she sees the real-life impact on families and communities when grandparents are called to act again as parents to their grandchildren, most frequently when she middle generation is impacted by substance use, abuse of overdose.