“Let’s Talk About What Just Happened”: a Single-Site Survey Study of a Microaggression Response Workshop for Internal Medicine Residents

Abstract

faculty development as part of a medical student microaggression training.

Patient Safety/Quality Improvement Primer, Part IV: Psychological Safety—Drivers to Outcomes and Well‐being

“…28 This situation is especially true for students and residents who want to maintain positive relationships with their colleagues while negotiating the hierarchies of their clinical learning environment. 27 Therefore, it is important for bystanders to learn how to perform microinterventions, which serve to (1) bring awareness to the occurrence; (2) stop, deflect, and reflect on what happened; (3) educate an offender regarding why a comment is hurtful; and (4) provide support to the targets of these comments. 28 Microinterventions are an important skill set to teach in the clinical environment that can defuse or mitigate conflict.…”

“…Microinterventions are an important skill set to teach in the clinical environment that can defuse or mitigate conflict. Fisher et al described the utility of a short educational workshop to provide resident physicians with tools to respond during these uncomfortable situations to help promote the psychological safety of all parties in the clinical environment 27 …”

“…Fisher et al described the utility of a short educational workshop to provide resident physicians with tools to respond during these uncomfortable situations to help promote the psychological safety of all parties in the clinical environment. 27…”

Institutionalized Misogyny: A Call to Action

“…2 However, we propose a category of microaggressions that has not yet been addressed-those we refer to here as institutionalized misogyny. Interventions have been developed for verbal and situational microaggressions in the workplace, 3,4 but what about when those microaggressions occur from the very tools we use to care for patients? To our knowledge, there is no systematic examination of these types of experiences in the literature, although we have encountered several examples during our own training and careers.…”

“…And the institutions that use them should be willing to demand just such a critical examination on behalf of their female staff and trainees. As a starting point, we recommend that healthcare institutions implement training for all staff using the toolkits that have been developed for person-to-person microaggressions, 3,4 and that they also create a reporting mechanism by which medical trainees and physicians can report the examples of institutionalized misogyny of the type we have highlighted. Such a report should trigger an examination of the tool, equipment, or working conditions that have been reported for potential update or removal.…”