Academic medicine : journal of the Association of American Medical Colleges
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Review Comparative Study
Measuring professionalism: a review of studies with instruments reported in the literature between 1982 and 2002.
To describe the measurement properties of instruments reported in the literature that faculty might use to measure professionalism in medical students and residents. ⋯ There are few well-documented studies of instruments that can be used to measure professionalism in formative or summative evaluation. When evaluating the tools described in published research it is essential for faculty to look critically for evidence related to the three fundamental measurement properties of content validity, reliability, and practicality.
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Comparative Study
The importance of anatomy in health professions education and the shortage of qualified educators.
The current shortage of faculty qualified to teach anatomy in U. S. medical schools is reversible. ⋯ The challenge is to realign departmental, institutional, and federal training grant priorities and resources, creating incentives for graduate students, postdoctoral fellows, and faculty members to stay the course and become the teachers needed to educate the next generation of health professionals. These strategies include (but are not limited to) team-teaching gross anatomy, thereby distributing the time commitments of a laboratory-based course more widely within a department; funds made available from the administration of medical schools to allow postdoctoral fellows to participate in teaching and providing compensation for the research activities; using "mission-based budgeting" to specifically compensate for faculty teaching time; and, finally, re-instituting federally funded training grants that solved this same teaching crisis in the not-too-distant past.
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Multicenter Study Comparative Study
Does students' exposure to gender discrimination and sexual harassment in medical school affect specialty choice and residency program selection?
To examine the role of gender discrimination and sexual harassment in medical students' choice of specialty and residency program. ⋯ This study suggests that exposure to gender discrimination and sexual harassment during undergraduate education may influence some medical students' choice of specialty and, to a lesser degree, ranking of residency programs.
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Review Comparative Study
Informal mentoring between faculty and medical students.
Mentoring skills are valuable assets for academic medicine faculty, who help shape the professionalism of the next generation of physicians. Mentors are role models who also act as guides for students' personal and professional development over time. Mentors can be instrumental in conveying explicit academic knowledge required to master curriculum content. ⋯ Maximizing the satisfaction and productivity of such relationships entails self-awareness, focus, mutual respect, and explicit communication about the relationship. In this article, the authors describe the development of optimal mentoring relationships, emphasizing the importance of experience and flexibility in working with beginning to advanced students of different learning styles, genders, and races. Concrete advice for mentor "do's and don'ts"is offered, with case examples illustrating key concepts.
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Review Comparative Study
A historical overview of interdisciplinary family health: a community-based interprofessional health professions course.
The Interdisciplinary Family Health course at the University of Florida Health Science Center is a course for beginning health profession students designed to teach core values, such as community-based family health, health promotion and disease prevention, and teamwork in the context of home visits. In addition, the course provides a valuable service to volunteer families by helping them identify useful community resources, and by formulating wellness care plans for prevention of illness and stabilization of chronic illness. In this article, the authors describe the historical development of the course, which began as a grant-supported pilot course for 20 medical students in 1996. ⋯ The theoretical constructs and objectives of the course were developed collaboratively by dedicated faculty from five Health Science Center colleges over seven years. In addition to benefiting the community and students, the course has encouraged an atmosphere of collaboration among faculty and colleges that has been a tangible benefit to the academic health center. The development and continuing support of this course demonstrates that barriers to such efforts can be overcome by dedicated faculty and administration.