How Medical Educators Can Manage Students ’ Professionalism Lapses in Three Clear Steps

When I became a medical educator, I experienced
attending to medical students’ professionalism lapses as a demanding and
time-consuming task. I had never been taught how to respond to these lapses,
and the literature did not provide clear guidelines. To find out how colleagues
in the medical education field handled this issue, my colleagues and I took up
a research study, conducting in-depth interviews with faculty responsible for
remediation at various U.S. medical schools. In this way, we learned that the
approach these experts use consisted of three separate phases, which we developed
into a road map in our
recent Academic Medicine article.

The first phase is explore
and understand. After being confronted with the professionalism lapse of a
student, expert educators initially take up the role of a concerned teacher. Their aim is to explore the unprofessional
behavior from the student’s perspective. They told me that the initial
questions they pose to students are ones such as: “Can you tell me what happened?,”
“Why did it happen?,” and “How do you feel about it now?” Medical school can be
a challenging learning environment. Educators want their students to develop
the mindset that anyone can make a mistake and that the goal is to learn from these
mistakes, to support each other in doing so, and, at the end of the day, to
collectively learn from accidental unprofessional behaviors.

The second phase, remediation starts if the student shows reflectivene...

Source: Academic Medicine Blog - July 11, 2019 Category: Universities & Medical Training Authors: Guest Author Tags: Featured Guest Perspective medical education medical students professionalism quality and patient safety Source Type: blogs