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ICYMI: The Best of Reflective MedEd 2016

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With the holidays upon us, we are taking this opportunity to showcase a few excellent posts from the year gone by.  We invite you to check out these highly popular posts.

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Darrell G. Kirch, MD, “Educating for Resilience and Humanism in an Uncertain Time.”
https://reflectivemeded.org/2016/09/27/educating-for-resilience-and-humanism-in-an-uncertain-time/

 

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Hedy Wald, PhD, “Becoming Zusha: Reflecting on Potential in Medical Education and Practice.”
https://reflectivemeded.org/2016/03/09/becoming-zusha-reflecting/

 

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Sunny Nakae, PhD, “Presence and Vulnerability in Medical Education.” 
https://reflectivemeded.org/2016/02/02/presence-and-vulnerability-in-medical-education/

 

Our Devices, Our Selves: How to Avoid Practicing Distracted Doctoring

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By Laura Vearrier

Americans check their phones an average of 46 times per day, (Eadicicco 2015) and they do so no matter what they are doing, including while driving, while at church, during sex, or out to dinner. (Rodriguez 2013) Are healthcare providers any different?  In a survey of medical students, 46 % reported texting, checking email, or making a call on their personal devices during a patient encounter, and 93% had seen a senior resident or attending do so. (Tran et al. 2014)  The answer to this problem is not as simple as turning off the device.  Improvements to medical care afforded by personal devices include efficient access to electronic text books, up-to-date literature, medical apps such as dosing calculators, and improved provider connectedness, among others.  The flip side is that the inevitable distraction created by smartphones creates a threat to professionalism in healthcare…
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Memento Mori- Reflecting on my Death and the Education of Medical Students

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By Laura Creel

As part of their undergraduate medical education, students discuss end-of-life care; they hear lectures about valuing the lives and deaths of future patients; they are instructed in the legal issues surrounding advance directives and care planning.  They see death, too—see it in the cadavers that they incise, see it in patients who die surrounded by family members and in patients who die alone.  Sometimes these experiences with death are personal; many times the experiences are stripped of emotion because they occur in clinical environments.  But although students see death in medical school, some recent research shows that approximately half of residents do not feel well-prepared to deal with the deaths of patients.[i]

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Ideals and Inadequacies: Living the Physician’s Vocation

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By Amy Blair

I was not sure I wanted to be a physician when I stood in front of the dark blue US mail box on the street corner of my college campus, one hand on the door handle and the other on my neatly typed applications, hesitant to let them go. I wanted an extraordinary life, but I wasn’t sure this was the right path.

The closest I felt to certainty was when I shadowed a family physician who cared for immigrants in a rural Midwest clinic.  He had served as a physician to countless victims in El Salvador during the civil war in the 1980s.  His past and current practices were rooted in his social justice, in the philosophy that all humans on the globe deserve the physical, mental and emotional well-being necessary to arrive at their potential.  I wanted to be a part of that and I began to imagine myself as a physician…
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To be heard you have to listen

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“Health Equity, Racism, and Dialogue”

By Lena Hatchett

I started writing this commentary as a reflection on my trip to the National Health and Prosperity Assembly, in August.  It was a feel good reflection on the power of listening.  As the presidential campaign has sunk to new lows, I’d like to share my views about the complicated relationship of identity politics…
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Building a House, Creating a Home

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By Matthew Schreier

“There is nothing more important than a good, safe, secure home.”
~Rosalynn Carter

Food, water, shelter, education.

These facets of a healthy, safe lifestyle are seen by most of us as a basic human right.  It is in their steady presence that we are able to pursue our goals of personal growth, intellectual achievement, and career success.  For people in many parts of the world, however, it is in the acquisition these basic rights that they must focus the bulk of their energy.

For one week of this summer, six fellow medical students, one physician, one bioethicist, one firefighter, one dean, and I had the opportunity to travel down to Belize and help a family build themselves a shelter.  Estrella, the woman for whom we would be building a house, lived in a house with her son and mother that had all the components of a home: photographs, decorations, a pair of adorable dogs, and one of the strongest family bonds I have experienced.  The structure of the house itself, however, was a bit less faithful, with the foundation sinking and the floor caving in to the moisture. The shelter that this family deserved was giving out on them, so together with Hand-In-Hand Ministries, we were to come down and assist them in building a new one…

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Social Scientists in Medical Education: Important Contributors to the Educational Mission

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By Bobbie Ann Adair White and Leila Diaz

When we began our careers in medical education in the early 2000s, our roles (Student Affairs and Admissions) were adjacent to those of educators but not truly intertwined in content development and delivery. We found there were opportunities to create and lobby for co-curricular social sciences content, but often these were ancillary to the basic and clinical sciences. However, in the mid 2000s content such as leadership, and interprofessional education began to gain traction, and the popularity of small group delivery methods grew. These trends opened doors for social scientists to contribute more meaningfully within the curriculum…
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