Moral Diversity for Medical Trainees.

While the proliferation of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives among medical schools and residency training programs has provided important benefits of demographic and experiential diversity among medical trainees, there has not been a similar emphasis upon the importance of moral diversity in medical training. Enhanced attention to the importance of moral diversity and the centrality of conscience to medical practice might allow trainees to better interface with the morally diverse patients they serve, learn important virtues like humility, patience, and tolerance, and deepen their understanding of and appreciation for alternative moral viewpoints among their fellow practitioners.

Enough.

The author presents a short story about doctors listening to patients and remaining committed to to their patients health. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

Accountability as a virtue in medicine: from theory to practice.

Accountability is a norm basic to several aspects of medical practice. We explore here the benefits of a more explicit focus on the virtue of accountability, which as distinct from the state of being held accountable, entails both welcoming responsibility to others and welcoming input from others. Practicing accountably can limit moral distress caused by institutional pressures on the doctor patient relationship. Fostering a mindset that is welcoming rather than resistant to feedback is critical to enhancing a culture of learning. Analysis of failures of accountable practice offers opportunities for improving the delivery of clinical care.

The Virtue of Hope in Medical Training.

While many of the challenges of contemporary medical training are characterized uniformly as "burnout," such a diagnosis is nonspecific and overlooks the degree to which the flourishing of medical practitioners depends on the development and exercise of virtue. The virtue of hope, in particular, is indispensable to sound medical practice generally and the flourishing of trainees. It is only through sound apprehension of the nature of the virtue of hope, the challenges to the cultivation of hope that residency poses, and practices that allow such cultivation, that contemporary trainees can learn to care well for patients and flourish in their own right. Summary: While the general term "burnout" is used to describe many of the challenges of contemporary medical training, a more precise characterization that unifies these challenges is a deficiency of the virtue of hope. Medical trainees face many obstacles to the cultivation of hope during training, but learning both to correctly identify this deficiency, and practices which prove a fitting response, offers a way forward.

The Admission Checklist: The key steps and responsibilities for the admitting resident.

The process of admitting patients from the emergency department to the general medicine floor is foundational to the medical training process and medical practice more generally. Yet this process is rife with potential error if not approached systematically, and residents rarely receive explicit teaching in this area. The creation of an "Admission Checklist" proposed by the authors could serve the function of reducing error and enhancing inter-provider communication throughout this process. Such a checklist could improve trainee experience and education, and ultimately allow for improved outcomes for patients during transitions of care.

Remembering the Art of Dying: lessons for medical trainees.

In her book The Lost Art of Dying: Reviving Forgotten Wisdom (2020), Lydia Dugdale claims that a deep cultural forgetting process underlies contemporary society's impoverished views of, and practices surrounding, death and dying. Her thesis, and the cultural developments that trace this story of widespread forgetting, offer insight into how medical trainees come to participate in such impoverished views and practices, to the detriment of themselves and the patients they serve. Through better understanding the tacit metaphysical and ethical forces that contribute to this process, trainees might better appreciate the insidious power of such forces on their moral development. Moreover, by turning to traditioned communities outside of medicine and to patients themselves, medical trainees may find the moral resources to reimagine their roles both in providing care and attending to their own mortality.