Catching them early? Using a pre-arrival task to encourage first year students’ engagement with professionalism

Abstract

Background
Medical professionalism includes aspects of professional governance, professional patient care and personal and professional development (Owen, Hill & Stephens, 2009). There is growing interest in what medical professionalism is and how we teach it. In the UK, the GMC specifically emphasised the doctor as a professional in Tomorrow’s Doctors (2009). While there is agreement that it is important to include medical professionalism in the undergraduate curriculum, there is still no clear model for doing so (Passi, Doug, Peile, Thistlethwaithe & Johnson, 2010). That said, there is a strong argument for teaching the cognitive basis of professionalism and then building upon this through experiential learning (Cruess & Cruess, 2006).

Following a curriculum re-design in 2013/14 Southampton medical school began to teach explicit professionalism in the early years through a combination of lectures, symposia, student presentations and tutorials. The introduction was accompanied by an evaluation (using quantitative and qualitative data), which indicated that the majority of students were struggling to see the relevance. In addition to reconsidering content, format and delivery, a pre-arrival task was introduced in 2014/15. Pre-arrival tasks are increasingly used within higher education more broadly. They are intended to build student engagement and seek to mobilise students’ prior learning and experiences in order to connect them with a new course and/or institution. This, to our knowledge is the first time that a pre-arrival task has been used in a UK medical school context.

The presentation will outline what we did, how students responded and will offer key learning points (for staff and students).

References
Cruess, R. L., & Cruess, S. R. (2006). Teaching professionalism: general principles. Medical teacher, 28(3), 205-208.
Owen, D., Hill, F. & Stephens, C. (2009). Medical professionalism: more than fitness to practise. The Academy Subject Centre for Medicine, Dentistry and Veterinary Medicine Newsletter, 01, (18), 16-19.
Passi, V., Doug, M., Peile, E., Thistlethwaite, J., & Johnson, N. (2010). Developing medical professionalism in future doctors: a systematic review.International Journal of Medical Education, 1, 19–29. doi:10.5116/ijme.4bda.ca2a
Riley, S., & Kumar, N. (2012). Teaching medical professionalism. Clinical Medicine, 12(1), 9-11.
Tomorrow's doctors. General Medical Council. Education Committee, 2009.

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