The Relation of Grit and Surgical Specialty Interest Among Medical Students

Huo, Bright; Dow, Todd; Helyer, Lucy

doi:10.1016/j.jsurg.2022.05.003

Cited by 4 publications

(1 citation statement)

References 30 publications

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“…For instance, grit has been verified as a criterion for assessing the soft power of medical school applicants ( 13 ), as it counteracts burnout in medical students in their first year of medical school ( 14 ). Moreover, grit is also known to be related to higher academic performance ( 15 , 16 ) and higher career interests in surgical specialties ( 17 ) among medical students. In addition, higher levels of grit were found to be a predictor of being selected for surgical training ( 18 ), receiving a grade of honor (versus high pass or pass) ( 19 ), and experiencing lower burnout in surgical clerkships ( 20 ).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Effects of grit on medical students’ wellbeing during clerkships: a longitudinal observational cohort study

Lin,

Chen

et al. 2024

Front. Med.

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IntroductionIn medical education, the clerkship phase is a demanding period during which medical students learn to navigate the responsibilities of medical school and clinical medicine. Grit, a personal quality regarded as a non-cognitive trait, refers to perseverance and passion; specifically, it represents the ability to endure hardship and work industriously toward a goal. Most studies analysed grit as a single concept and few studies have investigated the effect of grit on the well-being of medical students through the whole-specialty training (i.e. surgical and non-surgical specialty rotations) required in clinical clerkships. Therefore, this study investigated whether associations exist between medical students’ grit, measured by the two subconstructs of perseverance and passion, and their well-being during clerkships in surgical and non-surgical specialty units.MethodsThis one-year prospective web-based questionnaire study enrolled fifth-year medical students at a tertiary medical centre in central Taiwan between September 2017 and July 2018 in their first-year clerkship. The students’ sex, age, and grit were measured at the start of their clerkship. Routine surveys were conducted over one year to assess burnout and compassion satisfaction for students’ well-being, and the training specialty characteristics of the surgical and non-surgical specialty departments were recorded. This study included 92 medical students and 1,055 survey responses from individual specialty rotations. Descriptive, univariate and multivariate analyses were performed.ResultsOur results revealed that medical students’ perseverance, as part of grit, was related to lower burnout and higher compassion satisfaction during clerkships, but not the subconstruct of passion. Moreover, the positive trait of perseverance measured in our study had greater explanatory power for compassion satisfaction than for burnout. Furthermore, the results revealed that older medical students suffered from less burnout than their younger counterparts, and that male medical students expressed higher compassion satisfaction than their female counterparts.DiscussionPerseverance, as a subconstruct of grit, is a positive personal quality for medical students’ clerkships, and methods driving the cultivation of perseverance in medical education should be considered. In addition, even though positive traits such as perseverance equipped medical students for compassion satisfaction, additional factors attributed to medical students’ burnout must be identified.

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