Third and fourth year medical students’ attitudes about and experiences with callousness: the good, the bad and the ambiguous

Abstract

Students' attitudes about callousness are negative; women's attitudes are more negative than men's. Despite this, students (regardless of their demographic variations) regularly see it modeled by their mentors. Some students' narrative responses suggest they think being callous toward patients and colleagues can serve them well in some situations. The authors offer several questions to motivate further empirical and ethical inquiry into callousness and urge medical educators to consider its influence on students' conceptions of professionalism.

Evaluation of effectiveness of instruction and study habits in two consecutive clinical semesters of the medical curriculum munich (MeCuM) reveals the need for more time for self study and higher frequency of assessment

“…The return rates of 26% for students and 30% for the internal medicine faculty members in survey 3, as well as a response rate of 28.8% in survey 1 can be considered as representative and are comparable to data on return rates for email surveys for university students at 21% as well as for surveys by regular mail at 32% [7,8]. The overall return rate in survey 2 of 10.8% seems quite low.…”

Personnel flux and workplace anxiety: Personal and interpersonal consequences of understaffing in UK ultrasound departments

“…The data above also give cause for reflection on the key position of the participants themselves, a number of whom similarly articulated that their most difficult day-to-day problems also did not arise inexorably from short-staffing itself, but -for want of a better metaphor -from c It is rare, though not undocumented, for a senior clinician to be a counter-productive force in this respect. [36] building houses on shifting sands. With respect to the pertinent business of practical organisational management, it has been well-demonstrated that the persistent team member change, through internal or external movement of personnel, can have powerful detrimental consequences for a manager's capacity (and confidence) to coordinate a team at all, and the team's performance as a result.…”

Art, Clinical Moral Perception, and the Moral Psychology of Healthcare Professionalism

“…Callousness expresses that a clinician's moral perception is damaged, that some factor-institutional constraints or dysfunctional norms, for example-interferes with her capacities to discern and respond to others' vulnerabilities and needs (Rentmeester, 2007). Students witness callousness often (Rentmeester, Badura Brack & Kavan, 2007) during their training, and this should prompt our concern about the habits of perception students internalize as they are professionalized. Students' express in their narratives, as we've seen, that they are deeply concerned about becoming callous themselves.…”