Striking fear into students' hearts: Unforeseen consequences of prescribing education.

Purpose: Undergraduate medical education (UGME) has to prepare students to do safety-critical work (notably, to prescribe) immediately after qualifying. Despite hospitals depending on them, medical graduates consistently report feeling unprepared to prescribe and they sometimes harm patients. Research clarifying how to prepare students better could improve healthcare safety.

Reluctant heroes: New doctors negotiating their identities dialogically on social media.

Background: Ensuring that students transition smoothly into the identity of a doctor is a perpetual challenge for medical curricula. Developing professional identity, according to cultural-historical activity theory, requires negotiation of dialectic tensions between individual agency and the structuring influence of institutions. We posed the research question: How do medical interns, other clinicians and institutions dialogically construct their interacting identities?

Methods: Our qualitative methodology was rooted in dialogism, Bakhtin's cultural-historical theory that accounts for how language mediates learning and identity.