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Gender differences and similarities in medical students’ experiences of mistreatment by various groups of perpetrators

BACKGROUND: Mistreatment of medical students during medical education is a widespread concern. Studies have shown that medical students report the most mistreatment compared to students of other study programs and that the prevalence of mistreatment peaks during clinical training. For this reason, a...

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Autores principales: Siller, Heidi, Tauber, Gloria, Komlenac, Nikola, Hochleitner, Margarethe
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: BioMed Central 2017
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5557324/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/28806943
http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s12909-017-0974-4
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author Siller, Heidi
Tauber, Gloria
Komlenac, Nikola
Hochleitner, Margarethe
author_facet Siller, Heidi
Tauber, Gloria
Komlenac, Nikola
Hochleitner, Margarethe
author_sort Siller, Heidi
collection PubMed
description BACKGROUND: Mistreatment of medical students during medical education is a widespread concern. Studies have shown that medical students report the most mistreatment compared to students of other study programs and that the prevalence of mistreatment peaks during clinical training. For this reason, a study was conducted to assess prevalence of mistreatment among medical students committed by various groups of people. The focus was to identify whether gender was associated with the experience of mistreatment. Additionally, students’ perception of university climate for reporting sexual harassment was assessed. METHOD: In the study 88 medical students (45 women, 43 men) participated. A modified version of the Questionnaire on Student Abuse was used to assess students’ experience of various types of mistreatment and associated distress during medical education. To explore factors that could be associated with this experience the organizational climate for reporting sexual harassment was assessed with the Psychological Climate for Sexual Harassment. RESULT: The most often cited perpetrators of mistreatment were strangers (79.5%), friends (75.0%) and university staff (68.2%). Strangers mostly committed psychological mistreatment and sexual harassment, whereas friends additionally engaged in physical mistreatment of medical students. The most common form of mistreatment conducted by university staff was humiliation of students. These kinds of psychological mistreatment were reported to be distressing (43%). Gender differences were found in the prevalence of mistreatment. Women experienced more sexual harassment and humiliation than did men. On the other hand, men experienced more physical mistreatment than did women. Women reported experiencing more distress from mistreatment experiences than did men and also more often reported being mistreated by university staff than did men. Women perceived a greater risk in reporting sexual harassment to the organization than did men. CONCLUSION: Mistreatment of female and male students should be focused on using a gender perspective because types of mistreatment can differ by gender. Additionally, interventions should include the societal level as there was a high prevalence of mistreatment perpetrated by strangers. Also the issue of trust in the university needs to be addressed and the organization is called on to visibly demonstrate that it represents and protects its students as well as its staff.
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spelling pubmed-55573242017-08-16 Gender differences and similarities in medical students’ experiences of mistreatment by various groups of perpetrators Siller, Heidi Tauber, Gloria Komlenac, Nikola Hochleitner, Margarethe BMC Med Educ Research Article BACKGROUND: Mistreatment of medical students during medical education is a widespread concern. Studies have shown that medical students report the most mistreatment compared to students of other study programs and that the prevalence of mistreatment peaks during clinical training. For this reason, a study was conducted to assess prevalence of mistreatment among medical students committed by various groups of people. The focus was to identify whether gender was associated with the experience of mistreatment. Additionally, students’ perception of university climate for reporting sexual harassment was assessed. METHOD: In the study 88 medical students (45 women, 43 men) participated. A modified version of the Questionnaire on Student Abuse was used to assess students’ experience of various types of mistreatment and associated distress during medical education. To explore factors that could be associated with this experience the organizational climate for reporting sexual harassment was assessed with the Psychological Climate for Sexual Harassment. RESULT: The most often cited perpetrators of mistreatment were strangers (79.5%), friends (75.0%) and university staff (68.2%). Strangers mostly committed psychological mistreatment and sexual harassment, whereas friends additionally engaged in physical mistreatment of medical students. The most common form of mistreatment conducted by university staff was humiliation of students. These kinds of psychological mistreatment were reported to be distressing (43%). Gender differences were found in the prevalence of mistreatment. Women experienced more sexual harassment and humiliation than did men. On the other hand, men experienced more physical mistreatment than did women. Women reported experiencing more distress from mistreatment experiences than did men and also more often reported being mistreated by university staff than did men. Women perceived a greater risk in reporting sexual harassment to the organization than did men. CONCLUSION: Mistreatment of female and male students should be focused on using a gender perspective because types of mistreatment can differ by gender. Additionally, interventions should include the societal level as there was a high prevalence of mistreatment perpetrated by strangers. Also the issue of trust in the university needs to be addressed and the organization is called on to visibly demonstrate that it represents and protects its students as well as its staff. BioMed Central 2017-08-14 /pmc/articles/PMC5557324/ /pubmed/28806943 http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s12909-017-0974-4 Text en © The Author(s). 2017 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
Siller, Heidi
Tauber, Gloria
Komlenac, Nikola
Hochleitner, Margarethe
Gender differences and similarities in medical students’ experiences of mistreatment by various groups of perpetrators
title Gender differences and similarities in medical students’ experiences of mistreatment by various groups of perpetrators
title_full Gender differences and similarities in medical students’ experiences of mistreatment by various groups of perpetrators
title_fullStr Gender differences and similarities in medical students’ experiences of mistreatment by various groups of perpetrators
title_full_unstemmed Gender differences and similarities in medical students’ experiences of mistreatment by various groups of perpetrators
title_short Gender differences and similarities in medical students’ experiences of mistreatment by various groups of perpetrators
title_sort gender differences and similarities in medical students’ experiences of mistreatment by various groups of perpetrators
topic Research Article
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5557324/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/28806943
http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s12909-017-0974-4
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