Southern medical journal
-
Southern medical journal · Jan 2021
Patients Desire Personalized, Specific, and Continuous Advice on Weight Management.
To deliver effective care, healthcare systems should understand patients' preferences for weight management across a spectrum of needs. Our objective was to describe patients' perceptions of what helps or hinders weight loss and maintenance. ⋯ Health systems can support patients by developing processes for identifying the extent of a patient's knowledge and giving personalized advice based on the patient's preferences and experiences. Reassessing needs at defined intervals may help patients attain and sustain their goals.
-
Southern medical journal · Jan 2021
Does Medical Students' High Expression of Empathy Correlate with Their Choice of Primary Care Residencies?
There are many factors that influence medical students' (MS) decisions when choosing a career. Some prominent factors include life-work balance, indebtedness, and flexibility of work hours. Whereas the expression of empathy has many positive correlates with a trusting and meaningful physician-patient interaction, only a few studies have analyzed the association of MS empathy expression and primary care residency selection. The results of these studies about the relationship of MS expression of empathy and their selection of primary care specialties have been conflicting, depending on the empathy instrument used. In addition, there have been other variables that have affected career decision making in more recent years not previously encountered. The objectives of our study were to analyze the association of The George Washington University School of Medicine and Health Sciences (GWU) MS Interpersonal Reactivity Index (IRI) scores and their residency selection, to compare our results with previous studies to determine whether the IRI provided more definitive relationships between empathy and career choice, and to assess whether our results confirmed the theoretical construct linking empathy with primary care physicians. ⋯ There are no significant differences in expression of empathy in GWU students who chose patient- versus technology-oriented and primary care versus surgical residencies. The authors can only speculate why students' high expression of empathy was not associated with selecting primary care residencies, namely, women are outnumbering men entering medicine and are selecting technology-related specialties previously identified predominantly with men, and millennials have specific traits inherent in their generation that can affect their specialty choice. The results of our study shed doubt that the theoretical construct linking MS high empathy expression and choice of primary care careers is valid today.
-
Voting is one of our civic duties, yet many Americans do not vote, and physician voter participation is even lower than that of the general public. We aimed to explore pediatric residents' attitudes and behaviors in regard to voting and assess the impact of interventions aimed at increasing resident participation. ⋯ Intention to vote among participants was higher than voting participation; however, participants in this study voted at higher rates (69%) than the average citizen rates (61.4%). More than half of the residents who did vote indicated that the study interventions encouraged them to vote.