Publications by authors named "Bridget C O'Brien"

Purpose: Physicians have a professional responsibility to engage in lifelong learning. Some of this lifelong learning is required to maintain licensure and certification. Yet, this conceptualization captures only a small portion of the content areas and learning processes that physicians need to engage with to ensure quality patient care.

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Qualitative research seeks to provide context, nuance, and depth of understanding in regard to systems, behaviors, and/or lived experiences. As such, it plays a key role in many areas of medical education. Composed of myriad methods and methodologies, each of which may be valuable for some areas of inquiry but less so for others, qualitative research can be challenging to design, conduct, and report.

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Article Synopsis
  • The article discusses ongoing challenges in understanding the value and application of evidence in health professions education, questioning how effectively research translates into practice and policy.
  • By using Argyris' learning loops framework, the authors examine evidence from different perspectives, concluding that current expectations may be too high for both knowledge producers and consumers, indicating a need for broader, system-wide approaches.
  • They advocate for better tracking of how research is utilized in practice, promoting an understanding of scholarly work as a means to foster dialogue rather than solely serving practical decision-making needs.
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Interprofessional simulation-based team training (ISBTT) is promoted as a strategy to improve collaboration in healthcare, and the literature documents benefits on teamwork and patient safety. Teamwork training in healthcare is traditionally grounded in crisis resource management (CRM), but it is less clear whether ISBTT programs explicitly take the interprofessional context into account, with complex team dynamics related to hierarchy and power. This scoping review examined key aspects of published ISBTT programs including (1) underlying theoretical frameworks, (2) design features that support interprofessional learning, and (3) reported behavioral outcomes.

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Transferability is commonly identified as a quality criterion for qualitative research. This criterion was introduced by Lincoln and Guba to describe the degree to which a study's findings can be transferred to other contexts, settings or respondents. In this How To paper, we present a more nuanced, multidimensional view of transferability and explain relevant concepts, reflexive approaches and specific techniques to guide researchers in discussing transferability.

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Although U.S. medical education has continued to place increased emphasis on defining competency standards and ensuring accountability to the public, health care inequities have persisted, several basic health outcomes have worsened, public trust in the health care system has eroded, and moral distress, burnout, and attrition among practicing physicians have escalated.

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Background: Navigating the logistics and emotional processing of a patient's death is an inevitable part of many physicians' roles. While research has primarily examined how inpatient clinicians cope with patient loss, little work has explored how primary care clinicians (PCCs) handle patient death in the outpatient setting, and what support resources could help PCCs process loss.

Objective: To explore PCCs' experiences with the logistics and emotional processing of patient deaths and suggestions for supportive resources.

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Introduction: Qualitative approaches have flourished in medical education research. Many research articles use the term 'lived experience' to describe the purpose of their study, yet we have noticed contradictory uses and misrepresentations of this term. In this conceptual paper, we consider three sources of these contradictions and misrepresentations: (1) the conflation of perspectives with experiences; (2) the conflation of experience with lived experience; and (3) the conflation of researching lived experience with phenomenology.

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Purpose: Collaborations between basic science educators (BE) and clinical educators (CE) in medical education are common and necessary to create integrated learning materials. However, few studies describe experiences of or processes used by educators engaged in interdisciplinary teamwork. We use the lens of boundary crossing to explore processes described by BE and CE that support the co-creation of integrated learning materials, and the impact that this work has on them.

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Purpose: Professionalism has historically been viewed as an honorable code to define core values and behaviors of physicians, but there are growing concerns that professionalism serves to control people who do not align with the majority culture of medicine. This study explored how learners, particularly those from historically marginalized groups, view the purpose of professionalism and how they experience professionalism as both an oppressive and valuable force.

Method: The authors conducted a qualitative study with a critical orientation.

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Assessment for Learning (AFL) includes all educational activities designed to improve teaching and learning through gathering, sharing, and acting on information. AFL expands on the concept of formative assessment-which focuses mainly on an in-the-moment assessment activity-to include all processes that facilitate teachers and learners actively seeking and interpreting evidence to guide learning. AFL involves teachers and learners as partners and uses evidence to identify what the learner needs to learn (planning), review where the learner is in their learning (observing), and strategize how to maximize learning (supporting).

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Objective: To synthesise the literature exploring nurse and other clinicians' conceptualisations and experiences of roles and identities as they transition to educator positions and to identify facilitators/barriers to, and consequences of, successful transitions.

Design: A systematic narrative review of empirical research reporting clinician-educator transitions was conducted from database inception to December 2020.

Data Sources: Our search employed ERIC, CINAHL, PsycINFO, Scopus, Ovid MEDLINE® Plus, ERIC (ProQuest), and Sociological Abstracts (ProQuest).

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Purpose: Studies of workplace learning largely focus on how individuals (clinicians and trainees) learn in the clinical workplace. By focusing on individuals, these studies miss opportunities to explore the co-constructive nature of learning that may result in clinician-educators and trainees learning alongside each other (co-learning). The purpose of this study was to explore whether and how co-learning occurs in the workplace and what value co-learning holds.

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Purpose: Health systems science (HSS) curricula equip future physicians to improve patient, population, and health systems outcomes (i.e., to become "systems citizens"), but the degree to which medical students internalize this conception of the physician role remains unclear.

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: Medical students have difficulties applying knowledge about biomedical mechanisms learned before clerkships to patient care activities. Many studies frame this challenge as a problem of basic science knowledge transfer predominantly influenced by students' individual cognitive processes. Social cognitive theory would support extending this framing to the interplay between the individual's cognition, the environment, and their behaviors.

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Purpose: To understand the role of a workplace-based assessment (WBA) tool in facilitating feedback for medical students, this study explored changes and tensions in a clerkship feedback activity system through the lens of cultural historical activity theory (CHAT) over 2 years of tool implementation.

Method: This qualitative study uses CHAT to explore WBA use in core clerkships by identifying feedback activity system elements (e.g.

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Introduction: Many medical schools engage students in health system improvement (HSI) efforts. Evaluation of these efforts often focuses on students' learning outcomes and rarely considers the impact on health systems, despite the significant commitment health systems make to these efforts. Our study identified and evaluated system-level outcomes of pre-clerkship medical students' engagement in HSI efforts.

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Background: Internal Medicine (IM) subspecialty professional societies can provide valuable community, recognition, resources, and leadership opportunities that promote career success. Historically, this support focused on clinical and research dimensions of academic careers, but educational dimensions have gained more attention recently. This study explores how IM subspecialty professional societies support their clinician-educator members.

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Interprofessional simulation aims to improve teamwork and patient care by bringing participants from multiple professions together to practice simulated patient care scenarios. Yet, power dynamics may influence interprofessional learning during simulation, which typically occurs during the debriefing. This issue has received limited attention to date but may explain why communication breakdowns and conflicts among healthcare teams persist despite widespread adoption of interprofessional simulation.

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Purpose: Recent calls to improve transparency in peer review have prompted examination of many aspects of the peer-review process. Peer-review systems often allow confidential comments to editors that could reduce transparency to authors, yet this option has escaped scrutiny. Our study explores 1) how reviewers use the confidential comments section and 2) alignment between comments to the editor and comments to authors with respect to content and tone.

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Introduction: While authorship plays a powerful role in the academy, research indicates many authors engage in questionable practices like honorary authorship. This suggests that authorship may be a contested space where individuals must exercise agency-a dynamic and emergent process, embedded in context-to negotiate potentially conflicting norms among published criteria, disciplines and informal practices. This study explores how authors narrate their own and others' agency in making authorship decisions.

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