Confronting the Hidden Curriculum: A Four-Year Integrated Course in Ethics and Professionalism Grounded in Virtue Ethics

Promoting professionalism through humanities-based transformation

INTRODUCTION

In the last two decades, academic medical centers in the United States have faced a new challenge, dealing with breaches of medical professionalism in their staff, house staff, and medical students. Medical education settings have largely directed their professionalism efforts toward responding reactively to negative outliers.

DISCUSSION

This paper contends that the warrant of medical education mandates a transformative path forward. While negative behavior must be responded to meaningfully, so, too, must positive role models of professional behavior be publicly lauded for their consequential culture change in their institutions, and promoted as positive role models. Further, the promotion of medical professionalism must be part of this culture by proactively engaging all learners and health care providers with medical ethics and humanities-based knowledge, critical thinking skills, and role modeling.

CONCLUSION

Professionalism programs should be vested with the authority to implement an affirmative educational program intended to nurture and promote medical professionalism in each medical student, resident, fellow, and attending and utilize methods to that end employing both virtue and care ethics.

Medical Student Perspectives on Professionalism in a Third-Year Surgery Clerkship - A Mixed Methods Study

OBJECTIVE

The norms governing surgical training warrant a deeper understanding of students' experiences and interpretations of professionalism issues in their learning environment. However, there is scant empirical evidence to describe this process. To fill this gap, we analyzed students' perceptions related to professionalism, moral distress, and communication in the surgical clerkship, particularly regarding their clinical supervisors, whom we refer to as mentors.

DESIGN

We retrospectively evaluated written case vignettes and survey responses from medical students on their surgical clerkships regarding their experiences of cases which raised professionalism concerns. Vignettes and surveys were part of standard curricular exercises and analyzed using both qualitative and quantitative methods.

SETTING

Our study was conducted at a private academic medical college in the northeast with an affiliated institute of bioethics.

PARTICIPANTS

Two-hundred forty-one third year medical students on their surgical clerkships participated through required curricular submissions of case vignettes and surveys.

RESULTS

Vignettes and surveys from all 241 students were collected and analyzed. Of these, 106 (43.9%) were identified by the students as relating to professionalism, whereas the research team identified 148 (61.4%) cases as such. Major subtypes of professionalism concerns were categorized as "not showing proper respect" (38.5%), bias (30.4%) and "failure to meet medical standards of care" (29.1%). In professionalism cases, only 27.7% of students would emulate their mentor, 19.7% shared concerns with the mentor, and 58.8% experienced moral distress, all significantly worse than in nonprofessionalism cases (p < 0.001).

CONCLUSIONS

With an abundance of professionalism concerns noted, students experienced high rates of moral distress and were unlikely to share concerns with clinical mentors who they generally did not wish to emulate. Attention should be paid to providing a formal curricular venue in which students can discuss their concerns, as untoward experiences in the learning environment risk harming their learning and professional identity development.

When Fulfilling a Professional Obligation Causes Moral Distress: A New Evaluative Approach

PURPOSE

The term 'moral distress' was coined by Andrew Jameton to name the anguish that clinicians feel when they cannot pursue what they judge to be right because of institutional constraints. We argue that moral distress in critical care should also be addressed as a function of the constraints of ethics and propose an evaluative approach to the experience considering its implications for professional identity.

METHOD

We build on a selective review of the literature and analyze a paradigmatic example of moral distress, namely, clinicians who feel compelled to perform procedures on patients that seem futile. Such cases are commonly cited by clinicians as among the most morally distressing.

RESULTS

Our analysis shows that (1) physicians' experiences of moral distress can stem not only from toxic workplace cultures and institutional constraints on their time and resources for patient care but also from the limits of ethical reasoning and (2) an emotion-based evaluative approach to analyzing moral distress is needed to address its hazards for professional identity.

CONCLUSION

We propose a new evaluative approach to moral distress with implications for professional identity and the need for institutional education and support.

Professional Identity Formation in Medical Education: Some Virtue-Based Insights

Issue: In 2010, the Carnegie Foundation published a call to reorient medical education in terms of the formation of identities rather than mere competencies, and the medical education literature on professional identity formation (PIF) has since grown rapidly. As medical learners navigate a hectic clinical learning environment fraught with challenges to professionalism and ethics, they must simultaneously orient their skills, behaviors, and evolving sense of professional identity. The medical education literature on PIF describes the psychosocial dimensions of that identity formation well. However, in its conceptual formulations, the literature risks underappreciating the pedagogical significance of the moral basis of identity formation-that is, the developing moral agencies and aspirations of learners to be good physicians. Evidence: Our conceptual analysis and argument build on a critical review of the medical education literature on PIF and draw on relevant insights from virtue ethics to deepen the conceptualization of PIF in moral, and not just psychosocial, terms. We show that a narrowly psychosocial view risks perpetuating institutional perceptions that can conceive professionalism norms primarily as standards of discipline or social control. By drawing on the conceptual resources of virtue ethics, we highlight not just the psychosocial development of medical learners but also their self-reflective, critical development as particular moral agents aspiring to embody the excellences of a good physician and, ultimately, to exhibit those traits and behaviors in the practice of medicine. Implications: We consider the pedagogical relevance of this insight. We show that drawing on virtue theory can more adequately orient medical pedagogy to socialize learners into the medical community in ways that nurture their personal growth as moral agents-in terms of their particular, restless aspirations to be a good physician and to flourish as such.

Clinician Moral Distress: Toward an Ethics of Agent-Regret

Moral distress names a widely discussed and concerning clinician experience. Yet the precise nature of the distress and the appropriate practical response to it remain unclear. Clinicians speak of their moral distress in terms of guilt, regret, anger, or other distressing emotions, and they often invoke them interchangeably. But these emotions are distinct, and they are not all equally fitting in the same circumstances. This indicates a problematic ambiguity in the moral distress concept that obscures its distinctiveness, its relevant circumstances, and how individual clinicians and the medical community should practically respond to it. We argue that, in a range of situations that are said to be morally distressing, the characteristic emotion can be well-understood in terms of what Bernard Williams calls "agent-regret." We show what can thereby be gained in terms of a less ambiguous concept and a more adequate ethical response to this distinctive and complex clinician experience.

Strategies to improve hidden curriculum in nursing and medical education: a scoping review

BACKGROUND

The importance of hidden curriculum cannot be neglected in education. Despite much research in the field, there have been limited studies on HC improvement in nursing and medical education. This scoping review aimed to determine the scope of strategies to improve HC in nursing and medical education.

METHOD

PubMed, EBSCO/Cumulative Index to Nursing and Allied Health Literature (CINAHL), Cochrane Library, Scopus, Web of Science, Proquest and Persian-language databases of Magiran and SID were searched in January 2023 without a time filter. According to the PRISMA flow diagram, two independent reviewers selected the records that fit the inclusion and exclusion criteria via title and abstract screening. Next, the reviewers studied the full texts of the related articles. The data extracted from the selected articles were tabulated and ultimately synthesized.

FINDINGS

Out of the eight examined studies, published from 2017 to 2022, only one was in the field of nursing and seven were in medicine. The central strategies were implementing new curricula to replace the previous ones, utilizing team-based clinical clerkship, proposing a HC improvement model, implementation a case-based faculty development workshop, implementation longitudinal and comprehensive educational courses, and incorporating an educational activity into a small group program.

CONCLUSION

Students and faculty members familiarization on the topic of HC, implementing new curricula, utilizing team-based clerkship, and using comprehensive models were among the HC improvement strategies. Focusing on upgrading the learning environment, particularly the clinical settings, can also be helpful in HC improvement.