Medicine, Humanism, and Social Accountability: How the Values of the Gold Humanism Honor Society and Community Capstone projects collide

The following is the script of a talk that I gave last night at the induction ceremony for the Florida International University Herbert Wertheim College of Medicine’s 2014 Gold Humanism Honor Society.

Thank you so much for the opportunity to speak to you this evening.

The Gold Foundation was formed in 1988 with the purpose of nurturing and preserving the tradition of the caring physician. There was a concern then (as there is now) that the outcome of our medical education process was doctors who no longer had compassion for patients. The patients that were, for the most part, the very reason that we went into medicine in the first place.

The Gold Foundation proposed that the humanistic doctor, not just has, but displays on a daily basis certain attributes, described as IE CARES: 

Integrity – the congruence between expressed values and behaviors

Excellence in clinical care

Compassion – awareness of the suffering of others but also working to relieve it

Altruism – the capacity to put the needs of another before your own

Respect – regard for the autonomy and values of another

Empathy – the ability to put oneself in another’s situation

Service – sharing with those in need

These core attributes have real value and meaning in the care that we provide to our patients on a daily basis.

When the Gold Foundation was first formed, they asked several important questions.

1.    Can we identify students who are both scientifically proficient and compassionate?

2.    Are we selecting idealistic and humanistic young people for medical school, but then discouraging their spirit of caring through the education process?

3.    If we select students who don’t have the right characteristics, can we through education, teach them to be?

I would like to spend the next few minutes talking about each of these questions. As I speak, I believe that you will see the relevance of the Community Capstone project to this discussion.

So, the first question was:

Can we identify students who are both scientifically proficient and compassionate?

Before we answer that question, you need to ask yourself an important question: do you believe that it is important to be both scientifically proficient and compassionate?

Patients definitely do. A Health magazine survey (1) a few years ago found that the number one thing that patients wanted was a doctor who listens to them. Number two was being up to date on the most recent information in the medical field. Did you hear that? A doctor who listens was first, then being up to date.

Patients don’t want to see a really smart doctor who is a jerk

But they also don’t want a caring doctor who doesn’t know anything.

Both attributes are important.

In February of last year, the Association of American Medical Colleges’ (AAMC) Committee on Admissions endorsed a list of nine core personal competencies that medical students should have prior to beginning medical school.(2) These included ethical responsibility, dependability, a service orientation, social skills, the capacity for improvement, resilience, cultural competence, oral communication and teamwork. These seem like important characteristics that have some commonalities with the Gold characteristics even though it does not specifically mention compassion.

A survey of medical school deans done in 2007 (3) found that 90 percent thought that “Caring Attitudes” were emphasized during the pre-clinical and clinical years. 93 percent of the schools asked admission interviewers to assess the caring attitudes of their applicants. But do they do that?

I am sure that you remember the application process to come to medical school here at FIU. We started out looking at your college grades and your MCAT scores. Every school does that. Most every school in the country also uses an in-person interview to determine if you get into medical school. The interview’s purpose is try to figure out what kind of person you are. Do you have those other characteristics that will make you a caring and compassionate physician?

A specific type of interview, known as a semi-structured interview, is actually pretty good at predicting performance in medical school. And importantly, is better and figuring out if an applicant has those important personal characteristics such as compassion and ethical attitudes.(4)

So, the answer to the first question is yes, we can identify students who are scientifically proficient and compassionate.

The second question was:

Are we selecting idealistic and humanistic young people for medical school, but then discouraging their spirit of caring through the education process?

To answer this question, I want to tell you a true story that took place 23 years ago.This story is from my medical school experience. 

My first rotation was surgery. I was assigned to the VA hospital. It was across the street from the medical school and everyone wanted to go there. Remember, this was back in the old days. We never saw a faculty physician! So as a student you actually got to do a lot while you were working with the residents.

The surgical residents ran everything. And the Chief Residents were like gods. They could do anything, they knew everything, and could handle any problem that came along. We had one surgical chief that everyone was terrified of: Dr. X *. And as luck would have it, I was assigned to his team. The Red surgery team. I have no idea where he is now but back then he was the Chief Resident and ran the entire surgical floor.

Every morning we arrived at about 4:30 to pre-round on our patients. Each student carried five or six patients and we had to present each of them on rounds. At six o’clock AM, we met with the junior residents and went over all of the patients, updating them on any issues from the night before. We went to surgery in the morning and surgical clinic in the OPD in the afternoon.  And then we would wait. We had to wait for Dr. X to finish his case or clinic or his coffee (whatever he was doing) so that we could round again with him.

When he was ready, we would get a page. Back then it was just a voice page (there was no such thing as cell phones or text messaging). The page said “RED DOGS to the ICU, RED DOGS to the ICU”. We were the dogs, the medical students. At this point, it was usually 7 or 8 at night and you had been in the hospital since 4:30 or so.

Rounds with Dr. X were an exercise in terror.  If you talked to long, he would tell you to shut up. If he asked you a question and you got the answer wrong, he would just shake his head and say, “Stupid Medical Student”. If you tried to talk about family history or what the patient’s spouse was worried about or gave any social history he would cut you off. “I’m not interested in that…”

Was that discouraging?  Yes it was.

Experiences like this can cause you to develop a hard external shell. It is like a callous that develops on your psyche, to keep you from getting harmed. A survey of medical students found that they identified empathy, communication, integrity, and honesty as the most important qualities of a doctor.(5) But Morley and colleagues at SUNY Upstate in Syracuse New York found that idealism begins to decline as early as the end of the first year of medical school. (6) Empathy begins to decline as soon as you start to see patients and declines across all of the years of medical school.(7) You start out as caring people and then the weight of the medical education system begins to wear you down.

So the answer to the second question, is yes. We do things during the educational process that can damage you.

The third question was:

If students lose (or never really had important characteristics) can we through education, help them to develop or learn them?

From my perspective, this gets to the heart of the issue. 

This is the intersection of the Gold Humanism Honor Society and the Green Family Foundation NeighborhoodHELPprogram. 

If you want students to learn to be caring and compassionate physicians, it is important to see patients in the communities where they live.  As a student it is easy to get jaded by the difficulties of the patients around you.

Why did that patient miss his appointment?

Why doesn’t she get out of her house and walk more?

Why don’t they eat more healthy foods?

People smoke. People drink. People are obese, they don’t exercise, they don’t eat right. They don’t take their medicine. It is easy to get to the point where we believe that every medical problem that our patients have is their own fault. Rather than seeing and understanding that people’s lives are complicated and difficult. More difficult than our lives. Far more difficult than my life.

The only way to see that is to go out into the community.  Get to know patients in their own world, not in the artificial world of the clinic or the hospital. But in their home.

That is the simple brilliance of the NeighborhoodHELP program. You have the opportunity to see patients and families in their own home. Where they live. In their neighborhood. Their community.

The Community Capstone projects, build on that experience. The best Capstone projects, such as some of these that are honored here tonight, are the ones in which a student or group of students was impacted by something that they saw in the community, an issue. They found a community partner who was also interested in that issue. And they worked to address the issue.

We know that the humanistic qualities that are held up by the Gold Foundation can be nurtured through exposure to mentors who also have those qualities. Through experiences that encourage you to care for people not just take care of them. And through opportunities to reflect on those experiences.

When you applied for medical school, all of you said something about how you wanted to help people. You wrote in your personal essays about your motivations for going into medicine. I have read thousands of those essays over the years. Everyone says that right things, but many don’t follow through on those words.

You have the opportunity to do something different.

To care for people

To make a difference in their lives

Congratulations and thank you again for the opportunity to talk to you today

References

(1) http://www.tesh.com/story/health-and-well-being-category/top-things-patients-want-in-a-doctor/cc/6/id/5260

(2) Koenig TW, et al. Core Personal Competencies Important to Entering Students’ Success in Medical School: What are they and how could they be assessed early in the Admission process? Acad Med  2013; 88(5): 603-613.

(2) Lown BA, et al. Caring attitudes in medical education: perceptions of deans and curriculum leaders. J Gen Intern Med 2007; 22(11):1514-1522.

(4) Pau A, et al.  The Multiple Mini-Interview (MMI) for student selection in health professions training - a systematic review. Med Teach. 2013; 35(12): 1027-41.

(5) Hurwitz S, et al. The desirable qualities of future doctors—a study of medical student perceptions.  Med Teach  2013; 35(7): 1332-1339.

(6) Morley CP, et al. Decline of medical student idealism in the first and second year of medical school: a survey of pre-clinical medical students at one institution. Med Educ Online  2013; 18.

(7) Neumann M, et al. Empathy decline and its reasons: a systematic review of studies with medical students and residents. Acad Med. 2011; 86(8): 996-1009. 

* (name removed to protect his identity)

What’s new in Academic Medicine?

There were several interesting studies in Academic Medicine this month….

The first study (1) was led by one of my favorite educational researchers, Dr Geoffrey Norman. Dr Norman is one of the foremost researchers in the area of cognitive reasoning. In this current study, his team looked at resident physicians in Canada. Participants were second year residents from three Canadian medical schools (McMaster, Ottawa, and McGill). They were recruited right after they had taken the Medical Council of Canada (MCC) Qualifying Examination Part II.  They were recruited in 2010 and 2011. 

The researchers asked the residents to do one of two things as they completed twenty computer-based internal medicine clinical cases. They were instructed either to go through the case as quickly as possible without making mistakes (Go Quickly Group; n=96) or to be careful, thorough, and reflective (Careful Group; n=108). The results were interesting. There was no difference in the overall accuracy (44.5% v. 45%; p=0.8, effect size (ES) = 0.04). The Go Quickly group, did that. They finished each case about 20 seconds on average faster than the careful group (p<0.001). Interestingly, there was an inverse relationship between the time on the case and diagnostic accuracy—cases that were incorrect took longer for the participants to complete.

Another interesting study about diagnostic errors came out of the Netherlands (2). Dr Henk Schmidt asked an important question: does exposure to information about a certain disease make doctors more likely to make mistakes on subsequent diagnoses? In this study, internal medicine residents were given an article from Wikipedia to review and critique. The article was about one of two diseases (Legionnaire’s disease or Q fever). Half of the residents received the Legionnaire’s article, the other half the article on Q fever. Six hours later, they were tested on eight clinical cases in which they were forced to make a diagnosis. Two of the cases (pneumococcal pneumonia and community-acquired pneumonia) were superficially similar to Legionnaire’s disease. Two were similar to the other disease from Wiki (acute bacterial endocarditis and viral infection). The other four cases were “filler” cases that were not related to either case from Wikipedia. (aortic dissection, acute alcoholic pancreatitis, acute viral pericarditis, and appendicitis).

The results are a little scary. The mean diagnostic accuracy scores were significantly lower on the cases that were similar to the ones that they had read about in Wiki (0.56 v. 0.70, p=0.16). In other words, they were more likely to make an error in diagnosis when they had read about something that was similar but was not the correct diagnosis. The authors believed that this demonstrates an availability bias because they were more likely to misdiagnose the cases that were similar to ones that they had recently read about. Availability bias can also be seen with students, think about the student who comes from the Cardiology service. Every patient that they see in clinic with chest pain is having a myocardial infarction.

The last article that caught my eye was another study out of Canada. The authors, from the University of Calgary, wanted to determine if students that were doing their clinical clerkships in a non-traditional longitudinal fashion were learning as much as students in the traditional track. So they looked at all of the students who completed their clinical training in a Longitudinal Integrated Clerkship (n=34) and matched them to four students in rotation-based clerkships. Students were matched based on grade point average (GPA) and their performance on the medical skills examination in the second year.

The outcomes that they studied were the Medical Council of Canada Part 1 exam scores, in-training evaluation scores, and performance on their clerkship objective structured clinical examinations (OSCE). They found no significant differences between the two groups on the Part 1 exam score (p = .8), in-training evaluation (p = .8), or the mean OSCE rating (p = .5). So, apparently, students in a rural longitudinal rotation did just as well as those who stayed at the University hospital for rotation-based clerkships.                  

References

(1) Norman G, Sherbino J, Dore K, Wood, T, et al. The Etiology of Diagnostic Errors: A Controlled Trial of System 1 Versus System 2 Reasoning.  Acad Med  2014; 89(2): 277-284.

(2) Schmidt H, Mamede S, van den Berge K, et al. Exposure to Media Information About a Disease Can Cause Doctors to Misdiagnose Similar-Looking Clinical Cases. Acad Med  2014; 89(2): 285-291.

(3) Myhre D, Woloschuk W, Jackson W, et al. Academic Performance of Longitudinal Integrated Clerkship Versus Rotation-Based Clerkship Students: A Matched-Cohort Study.  Acad Med 2014; 89(2), 292–295.