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Medical student opinions on character development in medical education: a national survey
BACKGROUND: Recently United States (US) medical schools have implemented curricular reforms to address issues of character in medical education. Very few studies have examined students’ opinions about the importance of character development in medical school. This cross-sectional study assessed US m...
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Formato: | Online Artículo Texto |
Lenguaje: | English |
Publicado: |
BioMed Central
2015
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Materias: | |
Acceso en línea: | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4575457/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26384970 http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s13104-015-1434-z |
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author | Carey, George B. Curlin, Farr A. Yoon, John D. |
author_facet | Carey, George B. Curlin, Farr A. Yoon, John D. |
author_sort | Carey, George B. |
collection | PubMed |
description | BACKGROUND: Recently United States (US) medical schools have implemented curricular reforms to address issues of character in medical education. Very few studies have examined students’ opinions about the importance of character development in medical school. This cross-sectional study assessed US medical students’ opinions regarding character-focused education and their experiences receiving character feedback from educators. We mailed a questionnaire to 960 third year medical students from 24 medical schools. Respondents received a second questionnaire during their fourth year. Students answered three items that assessed their opinions regarding character development in medical education. They also indicated the frequency of positive/negative feedback regarding their character traits. We also tested associations between these opinions and various demographic, religious and spiritual characteristics. We used the χ(2) test to examine bivariate associations between each demographic/religious characteristic and students’ opinions on character development or feedback. RESULTS: Excluding 41 ineligible respondents, the adjusted response rate for the first questionnaire was 61 % (n = 564/919) and 84 % (n = 474/564) for the follow-up questionnaire. Twenty-eight percent of students agreed that one could be a good physician without being a good person; 39 % agreed that educators should focus on science instead of students’ characters; 72 % agreed that it was educators’ responsibility to train students to have good character; 1 % of students reported no positive feedback from faculty regarding character traits; 50 % reported no negative feedback. CONCLUSIONS: US students in clinical clerkships receive predominately positive feedback from educators regarding character traits. A majority of medical students, regardless of demographic and religious characteristics, are receptive to the role of character development in medical education. This finding suggests that character-based approaches toward ethics and professionalism training may find renewed receptivity among medical students despite recent “professionalism movement” fatigue. |
format | Online Article Text |
id | pubmed-4575457 |
institution | National Center for Biotechnology Information |
language | English |
publishDate | 2015 |
publisher | BioMed Central |
record_format | MEDLINE/PubMed |
spelling | pubmed-45754572015-09-20 Medical student opinions on character development in medical education: a national survey Carey, George B. Curlin, Farr A. Yoon, John D. BMC Res Notes Research Article BACKGROUND: Recently United States (US) medical schools have implemented curricular reforms to address issues of character in medical education. Very few studies have examined students’ opinions about the importance of character development in medical school. This cross-sectional study assessed US medical students’ opinions regarding character-focused education and their experiences receiving character feedback from educators. We mailed a questionnaire to 960 third year medical students from 24 medical schools. Respondents received a second questionnaire during their fourth year. Students answered three items that assessed their opinions regarding character development in medical education. They also indicated the frequency of positive/negative feedback regarding their character traits. We also tested associations between these opinions and various demographic, religious and spiritual characteristics. We used the χ(2) test to examine bivariate associations between each demographic/religious characteristic and students’ opinions on character development or feedback. RESULTS: Excluding 41 ineligible respondents, the adjusted response rate for the first questionnaire was 61 % (n = 564/919) and 84 % (n = 474/564) for the follow-up questionnaire. Twenty-eight percent of students agreed that one could be a good physician without being a good person; 39 % agreed that educators should focus on science instead of students’ characters; 72 % agreed that it was educators’ responsibility to train students to have good character; 1 % of students reported no positive feedback from faculty regarding character traits; 50 % reported no negative feedback. CONCLUSIONS: US students in clinical clerkships receive predominately positive feedback from educators regarding character traits. A majority of medical students, regardless of demographic and religious characteristics, are receptive to the role of character development in medical education. This finding suggests that character-based approaches toward ethics and professionalism training may find renewed receptivity among medical students despite recent “professionalism movement” fatigue. BioMed Central 2015-09-18 /pmc/articles/PMC4575457/ /pubmed/26384970 http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s13104-015-1434-z Text en © Carey et al. 2015 Open AccessThis article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated. |
spellingShingle | Research Article Carey, George B. Curlin, Farr A. Yoon, John D. Medical student opinions on character development in medical education: a national survey |
title | Medical student opinions on character development in medical education: a national survey |
title_full | Medical student opinions on character development in medical education: a national survey |
title_fullStr | Medical student opinions on character development in medical education: a national survey |
title_full_unstemmed | Medical student opinions on character development in medical education: a national survey |
title_short | Medical student opinions on character development in medical education: a national survey |
title_sort | medical student opinions on character development in medical education: a national survey |
topic | Research Article |
url | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4575457/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26384970 http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s13104-015-1434-z |
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