Patients benefit from mentoring students in an interprofessional health mentors program: A contextual-developmental analysis.

Purpose: Mentorship programs in health professional education are often characterized as a mutually beneficial relationship between mentor and mentee, but little is known about benefits for mentors. Mentors can be health professionals, academic faculty, other students (peers), and patients (health mentors). We studied the benefits that health mentors (people with chronic health conditions or disabilities, or a caregiver) get from mentoring students, and the contextual factors that contribute to, or explain these benefits.

Professional Identity Formation: A Role for Patients as Mentors.

Purpose: Medical education should foster professional identity formation, but there is much to be learned about how to support learners in developing their professional identity. This study examined the role that patients can play in supporting professional identity development during the University of British Columbia Interprofessional Health Mentors Program (HMP), a longitudinal preclinical elective in which patients, or their caregivers, act as mentors and educate students about their lived experience of a chronic condition or disability.

Method: The authors interviewed 18 medical residents in 2016, 3 to 4 years after they completed the HMP.

Patients and students co-develop a resource database.

Health professional students are provided with a wealth of online learning resources recommended by curriculum developers or instructors, the majority of which focus on biological and clinical science. Our goal was to develop a database of learning resources to help students and faculty members understand chronic health conditions from a patient's perspective. Resources were recommended by patients and evaluated by students.

The community comes to campus: the Patient and Community Fair.

Background: Community-based learning connects students with local communities so that they learn about the broad context in which health and social care is provided; however, students usually interact with only one or a few organisations that serve a particular population. One example of a community-based learning activity is the health fair in which students provide health promotion and screening for local communities.

Context: We adapted the health fair concept to develop a multi-professional educational event at which, instead of providing service, students learn from and about the expertise and resources of not-for-profit organisations.