Academic medicine : journal of the Association of American Medical Colleges
-
Sociodemographic identities, including race, culture, ethnicity, gender, and sexual orientation (race and culture), are recognized as important determinants of health, with significant impacts on patients' health outcomes, but teaching medical students about this is challenging. The authors sought to identify areas for improvement in delivery of critical content about race, culture, structural inequalities, and health disparities within a set of virtual patient cases used by U.S. medical schools and develop revision guidelines. ⋯ Feedback from faculty and students regarding implementation of the guide and delivery of revised content in Aquifer cases will be critical in determining the guide's effectiveness. This structured guide may be adapted to a variety of teaching modalities in medicine.
-
To address gaps in U. S. health care outcomes, medical education is evolving to incorporate new competencies, as well as to align with care delivery transformation and prepare systems-ready providers. These new health systems science (HSS) competencies-including value-based care, quality improvement, social determinants of health, population health, informatics, and systems thinking-require formal education and role modeling in both classroom and clinical settings. ⋯ Based on experiences implementing HSS curricula at two U. S. medical schools (Penn State College of Medicine and University of California, San Francisco, School of Medicine, starting in 2013), this Perspective explores the need for new educator competencies and the implications for medical education, including the need to identify and integrate "new" educators into the education mission, develop faculty educators' knowledge and skills in HSS, and acknowledge and reward new and emerging educators. These efforts have the potential to better align the clinical and education missions of academic health centers and cultivate the next generation of physician leaders.
-
The authors describe the importance of trust in health care, while noting with concern the documented decline in Americans' trust in the medical system, its leaders, and to a lesser degree, physicians themselves. They examine a number of reasons for this decline, including both larger societal trends and elements that are specific to health care. They then link trust to medical professionalism, explaining why the ABIM Foundation has decided to champion trust as an issue in the coming years. Finally, they offer thoughts on the specific actions the ABIM Foundation may take, including the launch of a Trust Practice Challenge designed to uncover practices that are currently working to build trust in a variety of practice settings and health care relationships, and the exploration of potential avenues to combat medical misinformation.
-
A large body of literature has demonstrated racial and gender disparities in the physician workforce, but limited data are available regarding the potential origins of these disparities. To that end, the authors evaluated the effects of race and gender on Alpha Omega Alpha Honor Medical Society (AOA) and Gold Humanism Honor Society (GHHS) induction. ⋯ These findings demonstrate significant differences between groups in AOA and GHHS induction. Given the importance of honor society induction in residency applications and beyond, these differences must be explored further.
-
To develop a road map for educators attending to medical students' professionalism lapses, aiming to offer an empirical base for approaching students who display such lapses. ⋯ An explanatory model for attending to professionalism lapses that fits in the overarching "communities of practice" framework was created. Whereas phase 1 and 2 aim at keeping students in the medical community, phase 3 aims at guiding students out. These findings provide empirical support to earlier descriptive, opinion-based models and may offer medical educators an empirical base for attending to students who display professionalism lapses.