Professional Identify Formation is regarded as fundamental to medical education. It involves a process of socialisation where knowledge is often acquired unconsciously via social interaction. Concrete teachings to support and mediate this socialisation process are difficult to implement, because of the implicit nature of the transferred knowledge. Before effective reflection can start, the implicit knowledge has to become explicit. The authors argue that training based on the Systemic Constellation method may be a promising way to support Professional Identify Formation among medical students, by increasing students’ awareness of their own socialisation process and the implicit knowledge that they have acquired. By visualising their social context with a group of students, the method is effective in making explicit the social context and the values, beliefs, perspectives that are present. This creates the possibility to discuss these values, beliefs, perspectives and explore differences, and stimulates individual and group reflection. The method is already widely used in business settings, but not yet in the medical education setting. This article presents how this new training method was implemented in the undergraduate medical curriculum of the University of Groningen, the Netherlands, and discusses its feasibility, acceptance and perceived usefulness by medical students.

BACKGROUNDThe growing demand for the development of leadership skills among medical students is widely recognized. For leadership development to occur, awareness of the organisational and social context and the impact of this context on personal and group functioning and well-being is essential. However, this social context awareness is largely based on tacit or implicit knowledge. We argue that the systemic training approach with the method of systemic constellations, is effective in making this implicit knowledge explicit and enhancing social context awareness. The systemic training approach is already widely used in business settings for leadership development and team building, but has not been applied in the medical education setting. It offers active and experiential learning and supports transformative learning. The aims of this research are (1) to evaluate the reaction of medical bachelor students on this novel approach for systemic awareness training and (2) to investigate if type of trainer (i.e., experienced systemic trainers versus newly trained systemic trainers with experience in the medical teaching setting) makes a difference for students’ reaction on the training.METHODIn 2018 and 2019, we included systemic awareness training in the medical curriculum of the University of Groningen, the Netherlands. We evaluated the training in approximately 300 third-year medical bachelor students right after finishing the training. RESULTS Most students liked the training (64.1%, N=143), 17.0% (N=38) were neutral and 18.8% (N=42) did not like it. The training gave useful insights to 148 students (66.4%) and for the majority, timing of the training was appropriate (N=164, 77.0%). Having trainers who were familiar with teaching medical students significantly increased students’ reports of liking and usefulness.CONCLUSIONSSystemic awareness training using the constellations method is liked and regarded as useful, especially when it is given by systemic trainers with experience in the medical teaching setting. A next step is to investigate whether such a training increases systemic awareness and as such contributes to medical students’ leadership development.

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