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.

Patients as educators: interprofessional learning for patient-centred care.

Background: Patients with chronic conditions have unique expertise that enhances interprofessional education. Although their active involvement in education is increasing, patients have minimal roles in key educational tasks. A model that brings patients and students together for patient-centred learning, with faculty playing a supportive role, has been described in theory but not yet implemented.

Active patient involvement in the education of health professionals.

Context: Patients as educators (teaching intimate physical examination) first appeared in the 1960s. Since then, rationales for the active involvement of patients as educators have been well articulated. There is great potential to promote the learning of patient-centred practice, interprofessional collaboration, community involvement, shared decision making and how to support self-care.

Difficult incidents and tutor interventions in problem-based learning tutorials.

Context: Tutors report difficult incidents and distressing conflicts that adversely affect learning in their problem-based learning (PBL) groups. Faculty development (training) and peer support should help them to manage this. Yet our understanding of these problems and how to deal with them often seems inadequate to help tutors.

Shared decision-making.

Shared decision-making has been called the crux of patient-centred care and identified as a key part of change for improved quality and safety in healthcare. However, it rarely happens, is hard to do and is not taught - for many reasons. Talking with patients about options is not embedded in the attitudes or communication skills training of most healthcare professionals.

Putting informed and shared decision making into practice.

Objective: To investigate the practice, experiences and views of motivated and trained family physicians as they attempt to implement informed and shared decision making (ISDM) in routine practice and to identify and understand the barriers they encounter.

Background: Patient involvement in decision making about their health care has been the focus of much academic activity. Although significant conceptual and experimental work has been done, ISDM rarely occurs.

Doctor-patient communications in the Aboriginal community: towards the development of educational programs.

Objective: Aboriginal people in Canada have poorer health than the rest of the population. Reasons for health disparities are many and include problems in communication between doctor and patient. The objective of this study was to understand doctor-patient communication in Aboriginal communities in order to design educational interventions for medical students based on the needs and experiences of patients.

Enhancing the relationship and improving communication between adolescents and their health care providers: a school based intervention by medical students.

Objective: To develop, implement and evaluate a workshop to help adolescents develop independent and active relationships with their physicians.

Methods: A needs-assessment survey informed the development of a workshop delivered by medical student volunteers and incorporated into the career and personal planning curriculum of high schools in Vancouver, Canada.

Results: Over a 6-year period, 64 workshops were delivered by 181 medical students to 1651 high school students in six schools.

Patient perceptions that limit a community-based intervention to promote participation.

A workshop designed to teach seniors to communicate more effectively with their physicians and enhance patient participation in the consultation was held in a community centre. A grounded theory analysis of follow-up telephone interviews provided examples of effectiveness but also revealed six categories of barriers to changing the pattern of established communication, particularly over the short term.