Speaking Up: From Exercise to Habit

By: Katie Rong K. Rong is a third-year medical student, SUNY Upstate Medical University, Syracuse, New York. After two years of learning basic sciences and rehearsing clinical scenarios behind classroom doors, I was excited to have proven myself worthy to be working alongside professionals; but I was also worried that I would be more of a hindrance than help on the team. It was this conscious awareness of my position on the totem pole of medical hierarchy mixed with my budding understanding of clinical medicine and team dynamics that ultimately made me a cautious, silent learner at the beginning of my third year of medical school. Then I got the assignment to speak up. As part of our clinical bioethics course, we are tasked to actively look for problematic situations around us that we are ethically responsible to speak up about despite concerns for our grades and evaluations. This assignment has been a part of our curriculum for a number of years, and the outcomes from a previous year have been reported in a recent Academic Medicine article. The assignment helps us keep in mind the ethical responsibility that we should be learning as we are learning about our clinical responsibility. We are given months to do this assignment, and judging by my experience, all of that time is needed. Slowly, through pattern recognition and the shared experiences of other students, I had more understanding of what problems are real problems, which ones are addressable, what I can do to help, wh...
Source: Academic Medicine Blog - Category: Universities & Medical Training Authors: Tags: Featured Guest Perspective clerkship ethics speaking up Source Type: blogs