Pedagogical and Personal Experiences Motivating Indigenous Students to Pursue Medical Studies

When it comes to accessibility to healthcare and medical education, inequalities prevail within ethnically diverse populations, especially among Indigenous Peoples. The main objective of this qualitative study was to explore how Indigenous female medical students’ motivations played a role in their pursuit of a medical career. We use the Self-Determination theory to frame this study and conduct individual open-ended interviews with four female Indigenous students’ regarding their motivational sources for applying to medical school. We provide an illustrative scenario for each identified motivational source through a thematic analysis. Results revealed two main sources of motivations: (Jones et al., Acad Med, 2019, 94 (4), 512–519) pedagogical experiences (i.e., contextual factors at school, academic interests, and opportunities) and (Sloof et al., Med Educ, 2021, 55 (5), 653) personal experiences (i.e., family support and influence, and future career prospects). Indigenous students’ personal experiences were more prevalent and described autonomous forms of motivations, whereas sources of motivation that were pedagogically oriented reflected more controlled forms of motivations. Different types of motivations can be useful, but not sufficient for the tipping point when the time comes for medical school applications. Learning about specialized Indigenous streams for admissions played the most influential role in students’ decision-making to pursue medical studies. Promoting the visibility of the Indigenous stream coupled with the identification of different forms of motivation could be informative when outlining evidence-based recommendations with the aim of improving inequalities within the health professions.

Scope and determinant of career preferences for medical preclinical students at Udayana University

The medical field has wide career preferences as the medical world develops, making it attractive for students to study medicine. The breadth of career preferences in the medical field exposes students to various career options according to their wishes and abilities. Insight into medical career preferences will help students determine the right medical career. This study aims to determine the determinants of career preferences of medical preclinical students in general in Indonesia. This study used a method descriptive cross-sectional. The data is the result of the questionnaire in accordance with the inclusion criteria of the sample. The number of samples obtained was 145 medical preclinical students at the Faculty of Medicine, Udayana University. From the results of the study, it was found that 138 students (95.2%) chose a career as a clinician and 7 students (4.8%) chose a career as a non-clinical doctor. Students who choose clinicians, choose a pediatrician and internal medicine specialist as many as 22 students (16.2%). Pre-clinical blocks that are preferred by students are Behavior 87 students (60%) and Endocrine 24 students (16.6%). Parental background, cost, and time required for further education are not obstacles for respondents to choose their career preferences.

Emergency surgery topics

Emergency General Surgery (EGS) deals with swift assessment and management of some of the sickest patients that we treat. Many NHS hospitals are dedicating separate resources for elective and emergency care, not just in the form of Acute Medicine but recently also as Emergency General Surgery, in recognition of this1. Throughout your medical career you will encounter these patients. Whether you are reviewing a medical in-patient with a distended abdomen, or seeing patients with abdominal pain in A&E or general practice, knowledge of the diagnosis and management of these common conditions is vital in enabling the delivery of optimal emergency surgical care safely. In addition, some 20% of patients are admitted initially under the wrong speciality and require the same prompt diagnosis and care by way of early diagnosis and treatment. ES is a core competency for every doctor.

Fighting Medical Racism with Education and Action

Denise Tyson is the president of the Maryland Acupuncture Society (US), one of the state-level professional organizations that comprises the American Society of Acupuncturists. Following the police murder of George Floyd on May 25, 2020, she called on her colleagues in the acupuncture profession to take meaningful action against racism and to educate themselves about the long history of racist violence against African Americans. In July 2020 an editor of Asian Medicine interviewed Tyson to learn about her medical career and her perspectives on race and health care. The main themes of the interview include: her affinity for acupuncture and Chinese medicine, her experiences with racial bias in both biomedicine and integrative medicine, strategies for making acupuncture organizations more inclusive, and the crucial role that education plays in combating racism.

Explanation of Medicine Clinical Faculty’s Experiences of Clinical Supervision: A Qualitative Study

Background: Educational clinical supervision is the direct or indirect supervision by the clinical supervisor of the processes performed by the student in clinical environments for providing guidance and feedback with the point of executing better and higher quality attendance to patients. Given that this supervision is one of the main activities in the teaching of the medical Career, The aim of this study was to explain the experiences of clinical faculty regarding educational clinical supervision.Method: This study is a Qualitative study and it was performed with the participation of 13 faculty members of the internal medicine and surgery departments of the medical school of the Islamic Azad University, Najafabad unit. The sampling method was purposeful and the data was been collected via semi-structured computing. Data analysis was been done by using analyzing qualitative content method with the Deductive approach. Results: They were placed in 3 main classes and 12 sub-classes. The main categories include fundamental roles, relaxed alertness, and Counterproductive behavior.Conclusion: Not attending to the challenges of didactic clinical supervision and the lack of a suitable supervisory structure will cause the reduction of the motivation of faculty (board) members and an increase of their confusion, as well as the formation of anti-production behaviors and reduction of the quality of clinical education.

Coping Strategies and Psychopathological Responses Among Medical and Non-medical Professionals – a Cross-Sectional Online Survey

Background: The SARS-CoV-2 pandemic was announced on March 11th, 2020, due to a surge of newly confirmed cases that significantly impacted populations worldwide, both directly and indirectly. Based on past epidemics research, the mental health implications of introduced restrictions should be expected and adequately addressed irrespective of the practiced profession.Objective: The study aimed to explore psychopathological responses, including post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), concerning coping strategy clusters during the COVID-19 pandemic among medical and non-medical workers.Methods: A cross-sectional web survey of the general population of internet users was performed from March 16th to April 26th, 2020, in Poland during the first peak of COVID-19 cases. A sample of 1,831 professionally active respondents, 64.0% of which pursuing a medical career, filled out General Health Questionnaire-28 (GHQ-28), The Impact of Event Scale-Revised (IES-R), and MiniCOPE, along with the socio-demographic questionnaire exploring personal as well as the work-related possibility of direct exposure to contagion and availability of proper protection, contact with the infected without accurate protective measures as well as the adequacy of workers when compared settings.Results: Individuals labeled with specific clusters had significantly different psychopathological manifestations. Irrespective of performed job maladaptive cluster was associated with significantly higher GHQ-28 and IES-R scores on total subscales and all subscales compared to those representing the non-specific and adaptive cluster. Similar findings were observed concerning the frequency of the GHQ-28 positive score. Moreover, the non-specific cluster was associated with significantly higher GHQ-28 total scores among medical professionals. However, GHQ-28 positive scores were significantly more frequent in medical workers using adaptive clusters when compared to non-specific. Such relations were not observed in the non-medical group.IES-R total and subscales' scores did not significantly vary within medical and non-medical groups when adaptive and non-specific clusters were compared. Pursuing a non-medical career was found to be a determinant of lower scores, while female sex was observed to be determinant of higher scores in both GHQ-28 and IES-R scales.Conclusions: Positive screening for psychopathological and PTSD symptoms was expected regardless of the analyzed groups' coping strategies. Given the dramatically developing situation of the COVID-19 pandemic, support initiatives grounded in research evidence may be essential for maintaining the mental well-being and resilience of both the medical and non-medical workforce.

Medical education and distrust modulate the response of insular-cingulate network and ventral striatum in pain diagnosis

Healthcare providers often underestimate patients' pain, sometimes even when aware of their reports. This could be the effect of experience reducing sensitivity to others pain, or distrust towards patients' self-evaluations. Across multiple experiments (375 participants), we tested whether senior medical students differed from younger colleagues and lay controls in the way they assess people's pain and take into consideration their feedback. We found that medical training affected the sensitivity to pain faces, an effect shown by the lower ratings and highlighted by a decrease in neural response of the insula and cingulate cortex. Instead, distrust towards the expressions' authenticity affected the processing of feedbacks, by decreasing activity in the ventral striatum whenever patients' self-reports matched participants' evaluations, and by promoting strong reliance on the opinion of other doctors. Overall, our study underscores the multiple processes which might influence the evaluation of others' pain at the early stages of medical career.

Focusing on Diversity: A Regional Internal Medicine Residency Viewpoint on Underrepresented Minority Support, Retention, and Mentoring

ABSTRACT Background While the overall percentage of residents who withdraw (2.7%) or take extended leave (1.0%) are low, subgroup analysis has found that minority physicians are approximately 30% more likely to withdraw from residency than their white counterparts and 8 times more likely to take extended leave of absence. With ongoing national efforts to support diversity in medical education through increased recruitment of underrepresented in medicine (UiM) students to residency programs, there is paucity of data identifying specific experiences challenging or contributing to their overall resiliency. Better understanding of the lived experience of UiM residents will allow residency programs to create successful curricular programing and support structures for residents to thrive. Objective We sought to understand UiM internal medicine residents' experiences during residency training. Methods We used a retrospective review of focus group transcripts of UiM internal medicine residents from 5 academic institutions in 2017 (4 in North Carolina and 1 in Georgia). Results Of 100 self-identified UiM residents from 5 institutions, 59 participated in the focus groups. Using a consensus-based review of transcripts, 25 distinct codes in 8 parent code categories were determined. Two primary themes emerged: resilience and isolation. Three secondary themes—social support, mentorship, and external expectations and/or biases—served as mediators for the primary themes. Conclusions UiM residents who became or were already resilient commonly experienced isolation at some time in their medical career, specifically during residency. Moreover, they could be influenced and positively or negatively affected by social support, mentorship, and external expectations and biases.