Perspective: medical students' perceptions of the poor: what impact can medical education have?
Delese Wear,Mark G. Kuczewski +1 more
TLDR
The authors argue that service learning, especially efforts that include gaining detailed knowledge of a particular person or persons, coupled with critical reflection, presents a very promising direction toward achieving these goals.Abstract:
There is currently little knowledge or understanding of medical students' knowledge and attitudes toward the poor. Teaching hospitals bring students face-to-face with poor and uninsured patients on a regular basis. However, an overview of the research available suggests that this contact does not result in students' greater understanding and empathy for the plight of the poor and may, in fact, lead to an erosion of positive attitudes toward the poor. A basic understanding of justice suggests that as the poor are disproportionately the subjects of medical training, this population should enjoy a proportionate benefit for this service. Furthermore, medicine's social contract with the public is often thought to include an ideal of service to the underserved and a duty to help educate the general public regarding the health needs of our nation. In their discussion, the authors situate medical students' attitudes toward the poor within larger cultural perspectives, including attitudes toward the poor and attributions for poverty. They provide three suggestions for improving trainees' knowledge of and attitudes toward the poor-namely, increasing the socioeconomic diversity of students, promoting empathy through curricular efforts, and focusing more directly on role modeling. The authors argue that service learning, especially efforts that include gaining detailed knowledge of a particular person or persons, coupled with critical reflection, presents a very promising direction toward achieving these goals. Finally, they posit an agenda for future educational research that might contribute to the increased efficacy of medical education in this important formative domain.read more
Citations
More filters
Journal ArticleDOI
Teaching the Social Determinants of Health: A Path to Equity or a Road to Nowhere?
TL;DR: How "critical consciousness" and a recentering of the SDOH around justice and inequity can be used to deepen collective understanding of power, privilege, and the inequities embedded in social relationships in order to foster an active commitment to social justice among medical trainees is explored.
Journal ArticleDOI
Empathy development in medical education – A critical review
TL;DR: The gap between biomedicine and the humanities could be bridged, and empathy training could contribute both in developing physicians’ general clinical perception and judgement and in preventing the widespread stunting of empathy.
Journal ArticleDOI
Understanding the goals of service learning and community-based medical education: a systematic review.
TL;DR: It is proposed that the principle of community partnership within medical education could train a cohort of medical students prepared to practice in the rapidly changing health care environment—one that now includes an important new agenda of community accountability.
Journal ArticleDOI
Reclaiming a theoretical orientation to reflection in medical education research: a critical narrative review
TL;DR: It is argued that some of the common ways in which reflection has been applied are influenced by broader discourses of assessment and evidence, and divorced from original theories of reflection and reflective practice.
Journal ArticleDOI
Learning through longitudinal patient care-narratives from the Harvard Medical School-Cambridge Integrated Clerkship.
Barbara Ogur,David Hirsh +1 more
TL;DR: Organizing learning in the principal clinical year around longitudinal patient care seems to offer significant advantages for learning and professional development.
References
More filters
Journal ArticleDOI
Cultural Competence: A Systematic Review of Health Care Provider Educational Interventions
Mary Catherine Beach,Eboni G. Price,Tiffany L. Gary,Karen A. Robinson,Aysegul Gozu,Ana Palacio,Carole Smarth,Mollie W. Jenckes,Carolyn J Feuerstein,Eric B Bass,Neil R. Powe,Lisa A. Cooper +11 more
TL;DR: Cultural competence training shows promise as a strategy for improving the knowledge, attitudes, and skills of health professionals, however, evidence that it improves patient adherence to therapy, health outcomes, and equity of services across racial and ethnic groups is lacking.
Journal ArticleDOI
Attitudes Toward the Poor and Attributions for Poverty
TL;DR: This article investigated the relationship among feelings about the poor and poverty, stereotypes of the poor, attributions for poverty, and sociopolitical ideologies (as assessed by the Protestant Ethic, Belief in a Just World, and Right Wing Authoritarianism Scales).
Journal ArticleDOI
Is there hardening of the heart during medical school
TL;DR: The findings suggest that undergraduate medical education may be a major determinant differentially affecting the vicarious empathy of students on the basis of gender and/or specialty choice.
Journal ArticleDOI
Role modeling in physicians' professional formation: reconsidering an essential but untapped educational strategy
TL;DR: The authors identify foundational questions regarding role models and professional character formation; describe major social and historical reasons for inattention to character formation in new physicians; draw insights about this important area from ethics and education theory; and suggest the practical consequences of this work for faculty recruitment, affirmation, and development.
Journal ArticleDOI
Service-Learning: Community-Campus Partnerships for Health Professions Education.
TL;DR: How service-learning differs from traditional clinical education in the health professions is described and how service- learning programs may benefit students, faculty, communities, higher education institutions, and the relationships among all these stakeholders is discussed.
Related Papers (5)
Medical Students' Attitudes Toward Providing Care for the Underserved: Are We Training Socially Responsible Physicians?
Beyond cultural competence: critical consciousness, social justice, and multicultural education.
Arno K. Kumagai,Monica L. Lypson +1 more