Unlabelled: The stresses of medical training can lead to burnout and other adverse outcomes. The Flourish curriculum was designed to mitigate negative effects of stress among clerkship students through debriefing and skills-building activities that foster practical wisdom: mindfulness, appreciative practice, story-telling/listening, and reflection. Students rated the curriculum highly, felt it addressed common concerns about clerkships, and were able to apply techniques from the curriculum to their clinical work.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFIn Part 1 of this 2-article series, the authors reviewed the problem of unmitigated bias in medical education and proposed a wisdom-based framework for a different way of educating medical students. In this article, Part 2, the authors answer a key question: How can medical educators do better? Is a bias-free environment possible? The answer to the latter question likely is "no." In fact, having a zero-bias goal in mind may blind educators and students to the implicit biases that affect physicians' decisions and actions.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBias is a ubiquitous problem in human functioning. It has plagued medical decision making, making physicians prone to errors of perception and judgment. Racial, gender, ethnic, and religious negative biases infest physicians' perception and cognition, causing errors of judgment and behavior that are damaging.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFCoaching is a critical tool to guide student development of clinical competency and formation of professional identity in medicine, two inextricably linked concepts. Because progress toward clinical competence is linked to thinking, acting and feeling like a physician, a coach's knowledge about a learner's development of clinical skills is essential to promoting the learner's professional identity formation. A longitudinal coaching program provides a foundation for the formation of coach-learner relationships built on trust.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFFam Med Community Health
December 2020
Objective: To explore leadership perspectives on how to maintain high quality efficient care that is also person-centered and humanistic.
Methods: The authors interviewed and collected narrative transcripts from a convenience sample of 32 institutional healthcare leaders at seven U.S.
Background: Changes in the organization of medical practice have impeded humanistic practice and resulted in widespread physician burnout and dissatisfaction.
Objective: To identify organizational factors that promote or inhibit humanistic practice of medicine by faculty physicians.
Design: From January 1, 2015, through December 31, 2016, faculty from eight US medical schools were asked to write reflectively on two open-ended questions regarding institutional-level motivators and impediments to humanistic practice and teaching within their organizations.
The authors describe the first 11 academic years (2005-2006 through 2016-2017) of a longitudinal, small-group faculty development program for strengthening humanistic teaching and role modeling at 30 U.S. and Canadian medical schools that continues today.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFObjective: Major reorganizations of medical practice today challenge physicians' ability to deliver compassionate care. We sought to understand how physicians who completed an intensive faculty development program in medical humanism sustain their humanistic practices.
Methods: Program completers from 8 U.
Chronic pain remains a daunting clinical challenge, affecting 30% of people in the United States and 20% of the global population. People meeting this challenge by achieving wellbeing while living with pain are a virtually untapped source of wisdom about this persistent problem. Employing a concurrent mixed-methods design, we studied 80 people living with chronic pain with "positive stories to tell" using semi-structured interviews and standardized questionnaires.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFPurpose: Confronting medical error openly is critical to organizational learning, but less is known about what helps individual clinicians learn and adapt positively after making a harmful mistake. Understanding what factors help doctors gain wisdom can inform educational and peer support programs, and may facilitate the development of specific tools to assist doctors after harmful errors occur.
Method: Using "posttraumatic growth" as a model, the authors conducted semistructured interviews (2009-2011) with 61 physicians who had made a serious medical error.
The Graduate Medical Education (GME) system in the United States (US) has garnered worldwide respect, graduating over 25,000 new physicians from over 8,000 residency and fellowship programs annually. GME is the portal of entry to medical practice and licensure in the US, and the pathway through which resident physicians develop the competence to practice independently and further develop their career plans. The number and specialty distribution of available GME positions shapes the overall composition of our national workforce; however, GME is failing to provide appropriate programs that support the delivery of our society's system of healthcare.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFObjective: Medical errors are a nearly universal experience for physicians. An error that harms a patient is one of the most difficult experiences that physicians face. Difficult experiences can result in growth.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFAlexander Pope, in his Essay on Criticism, proposes that "To err is human; to forgive divine." This essay considers the latter half of that proposition and includes quotes from doctors who participated in a study of learning and growing through adversity. Doctors, like poets, find it necessary to put their moral and psychological dilemma into words.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFDespite ongoing efforts to improve working conditions, address well-being of faculty and students, and promote professionalism, many still feel the culture of academic medicine is problematic. Depression and burnout persist among physicians and trainees. The authors propose that culture change is so challenging in part because of an evolutionary construct known as the negativity bias that is reinforced serially in medical education.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFPatient Educ Couns
September 2012
Objective: The aim was to examine the role of talking (or remaining silent) in the physician's experience of coping with medical error.
Methods: Sixty-one physicians participated in in-depth interviews about their experience of coping with a serious medical error. We analyzed verbatim transcripts to develop a taxonomic analysis of talking domains to capture the physician experience of talking and coping with error.
To achieve transformational change, a transformational approach is needed. The Appreciative Inquiry (AI) summit is a method that has been used to achieve transformational change in business for at least 20 years, but this innovative alternative approach is unknown to nursing. At the University of Virginia School of Nursing, an AI Summit was designed to bring all staff, faculty, student representatives, and members of the community together to rewrite the school's strategic plan.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: Resident duty hour restrictions have resulted in more frequent patient care handoffs, increasing the need for improved quality of residents' sign-out process.
Objective: To characterize resident sign-out process and identify effective strategies for quality improvement.
Design: Mixed methods analysis of resident sign-out, including a survey of resident views, prospective observation and characterization of 64 consecutive sign-out sessions, and an appreciative-inquiry approach for quality improvement.
Objective: To compare patient demographics and Rapid Estimate of Adult Literacy in Medicine (REALM) scores with respect to their ability to predict medication comprehension.
Methods: A survey was conducted of 100 patients presenting for follow-up at an academic primary care clinic serving a low socio-economic status population. The Medication Knowledge Score (MKS) consisted of knowledge of drug name, dose, indication, and a potential side effect for each of their medications and then averaged.
Improving patient safety and quality in health care is one of medicine's most pressing challenges. Residency training programs have a unique opportunity to meet this challenge by training physicians in the science and methods of patient safety and quality improvement (QI).With support from the Health Resources and Services Administration, the authors developed an innovative, longitudinal, experiential curriculum in patient safety and QI for internal medicine residents at the University of Virginia.
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