Academic medicine : journal of the Association of American Medical Colleges
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COVID-19 has disrupted every aspect of the U. S. health care and health professions education systems, creating anxiety, suffering, and chaos and exposing many of the flaws in the nation's public health, medical education, and political systems. The pandemic has starkly revealed the need for a better public health infrastructure and a health system with incentives for population health and prevention of disease as well as outstanding personalized curative health. ⋯ Incorporating innovations such as telemedicine, used under duress during the pandemic, could alter educational and clinical approaches to create something better for students, residents, and patients. He explains that journals such as Academic Medicine can provide rapid, curated, expert advice that can be an important counterweight to the misinformation that circulates during disasters. Such journals can also inform their readers about new training in skills needed to mitigate the ongoing effects of the disaster and prepare the workforce for future disasters.
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Managing a Specialty Service During the COVID-19 Crisis: Lessons From a New York City Health System.
The COVID-19 pandemic has stretched health care resources to a point of crisis throughout the world. To answer the call for care, health care workers in a diverse range of specialties are being retasked to care for patients with COVID-19. Consequently, specialty services have had to adapt to decreased staff available for coverage coupled with a need to remain available for specialty-specific emergencies, which now require a dynamic definition. In this Invited Commentary, the authors describe their experiences and share lessons learned regarding triage of patients, staff safety, workforce management, and the psychological impact as they have adapted to a new reality in the Department of Neurosurgery at Montefiore Medical Center, a COVID-19 hot spot in New York City.
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Research on professional identity formation has largely ignored how race, ethnicity, and the larger sociohistorical context work to shape medical students' professional identity. Researchers investigated how physician-trainees considered underrepresented in medicine (URM) negotiate their professional identity within the larger sociohistorical context that casts them in a negative light. ⋯ Race, ethnicity, and the larger sociohistorical context is often overlooked in professional identity formation research, and this omission has resulted in an underappreciation of the challenges URM physicians' experience as they develop a professional identity. Within the context of this study, findings demonstrated that black/African American physicians negotiated the formation of professional identity within a challenging sociohistorical context, which should be given greater consideration in related research.