Medical Students Learn Professionalism in Near-Peer Led, Discussion-Based Small Groups.

Problem: Medical educators recognize that professionalism is difficult to teach to students in lecture-based or faculty-led settings. An underused but potentially valuable alternative is to enroll near-peers to teach professionalism. Intervention: We describe a novel near-peer curriculum on professionalism developed at Queen's University School of Medicine. Senior medical students considered role models by their classmates were nominated to facilitate small-group seminars with junior students on topics in professionalism. Each session was preceded by brief pre-readings or prompts and engaged students in semistructured, open-ended discussion. Three 2-hour sessions have occurred annually. Context: The near-peer sessions are a required component (6 hours; 20%) of the 1st-year professionalism course at Queen's University (30 hours), which otherwise includes faculty-led seminars, lectures, and online modules. Senior facilitators are selected through a peer nomination process during their 3rd year of medical school. This format was chosen to create a highly regarded position to which students could aspire by demonstrating positive professionalism. Outcome: We performed a qualitative descriptive evaluation of the near-peer curriculum. Fifty-six medical students participated in 11 focus group interviews, which were coded and analyzed for themes inductively and deductively. Quantitative reviews of student feedback forms and a third-party thematic analysis were performed to triangulate results. Medical students preferred the near-peer-led discussion-based curriculum to faculty-led seminars and didactic or online formats. Junior students could describe specific examples of how the curriculum had influenced their behavior in academic, clinical, and personal settings. They cited senior near-peer facilitators as the strongest aspect of the curriculum for their social and cognitive congruence. Senior students who had facilitated sessions regarded the peer teaching experience as formative to their own understanding of professionalism. Lessons Learned: Formal medical curricula on professionalism should emphasize near-peer-led small-group discussion as it fosters a nuanced understanding of professionalism for both early level students and senior students acting as teachers.

Beyond trail blazing: a roadmap for new healthcare ethics leaders (and the people who hire them).

This article is intended to serve as a roadmap to help new healthcare ethics leaders establish or renew an ethics program in a healthcare organization. The authors share a systemic step-by-step process for navigating this early career passage. In this paper, we describe five critical success strategies and provide explanations and concrete tools to help get you on the road to success as quickly and painlessly as possible. We will discuss how to define your role; diagnose your organization's needs; build important relationships; and develop a strategic plan for starting or revitalizing an ethics program. We also review some of the more personal challenges that may be encountered along the way, and identify social supports and self-care strategies. The advice we provide grows out of reflections on our collective experience as new ethics leaders in three Ontario healthcare organizations.

Education for ethics practice: tailoring curricula to local needs and objectives.

Currently, there is no authoritative credentialing process for individuals engaged in ethics practice, no accreditation system that sets minimum education standards for programs aiming to prepare these individuals for their work, and little evidence available that any particular training model is actually achieving its pedagogical goals. At the same time, a number of healthcare organizations and universities now routinely offer post-graduate programs, clinical fellowships and in-house training specifically devised to prepare graduates for ethics practice. However, while their numbers appear to be growing, information about these programs is limited. In this paper, we describe the goals, content and strategies of three educational programs offered in Ontario, Canada. These case studies highlight the diversity of ethics education available to those who engage in ethics practice and underscore the need to take this variety into account in the development of future education standards that would specify minimally acceptable educational requirements.