Advances in health sciences education : theory and practice
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Adv Health Sci Educ Theory Pract · Oct 2009
Discrediting the notion "working with 'crazies' will make you 'crazy'": addressing stigma and enhancing empathy in medical student education.
People with mental illness around the world continue to suffer from stigmatization and limited care. Previous studies utilizing self-report questionnaires indicate that many medical students regard clinical work with psychiatric patients as unappealing, while the professionalism literature has documented a general decline in students' capacity for empathy over the course of medical school. Through in-depth interviews, this study attempts to better understand the formation of medical students' perceptions of psychiatry and the implications of that process for a more general understanding of the impact of emotionally-laden experiences on medical students' capacity for empathy. ⋯ Teaching faculty need to directly address the stigma and stereotypes that surround mental illness and actively help medical students cope with the stress that they report experiencing during their psychiatry clerkship in order to improve the recognition and treatment of psychiatric illness by newly graduating physicians. More generally, the relationships that we identify among stress, stigmatization, and stereotyping along an empathic spectrum suggest that increased attention should be paid to the stress that empathy can entail. This perspective may allow for the creation of similarly targeted interventions throughout the medical school curriculum to counteract the decline in empathy, the so-called "hardening of the heart," associated with physician-training worldwide.
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Adv Health Sci Educ Theory Pract · Oct 2009
Analysis of factors that predict clinical performance in medical school.
Academic achievement indices including GPAs and MCAT scores are used to predict the spectrum of medical student academic performance types. However, use of these measures ignores two changes influencing medical school admissions: student diversity and affirmative action, and an increased focus on communication skills. To determine if GPA and MCAT predict performance in medical school consistently across students, and whether either predicts clinical performance in clerkships. ⋯ Significant differences between majority and minority students were observed. MCAT scores, for example, did not predict performance of minority students in the first year of medical school but did predict performance of majority students. This information may be of use to medical school admissions and resident selection committees.