Justice and care: decision making by medical school student promotions committees.

CONTEXT: The function of medical school entities that determine student advancement or dismissal has gone largely unexplored. The decision making of 'academic progress' or student promotions committees is examined using a theoretical framework contrasting ethics of justice and care, with roots in the moral development work of theorists Kohlberg and Gilligan. OBJECTIVES: To ascertain promotions committee members' conceptualisation of the role of their committee, ethical orientations used in member decision making, and student characteristics most influential in that decision making. METHODS: An electronic survey was distributed to voting members of promotions committees at 143 accredited allopathic medical schools in the USA. Descriptive statistics were calculated and data were analysed by gender, role, institution type and class size. RESULTS: Respondents included 241 voting members of promotions committees at 55 medical schools. Respondents endorsed various promotions committee roles, including acting in the best interest of learners' future patients and graduating highly qualified learners. Implementing policy was assigned lower importance. The overall pattern of responses did not indicate a predominant orientation toward an ethic of justice or care. Respondents indicated that committees have discretion to take individual student characteristics into consideration during deliberations, and that they do so in practice. Among the student characteristics with the greatest influence on decision making, professionalism and academic performance were paramount. Eighty-five per cent of participants indicated that they received no training. CONCLUSIONS: Promotions committee members do not regard orientations of justice and care as being mutually exclusive and endorse an array of statements regarding the committee's purpose that may conflict with one another. The considerable variance in the influence of student characteristics and the general absence of committee member training indicate a need for clear delineation of the medical profession's priorities in terms of justice and care, and of the specific student characteristics that should factor into deliberations.

A 5-year experience with an elective scholarly concentrations program.

PROBLEM: Programs that encourage scholarly activities beyond the core curriculum and traditional biomedical research are now commonplace among US medical schools. Few studies have generated outcome data for these programs. The goal of the present study was to address this gap. INTERVENTION: The Scholarly Concentration (SC) Program, established in 2006 at the Warren Alpert Medical School of Brown University, is a 4-year elective program that not only encourages students to pursue scholarly work that may include traditional biomedical research but also seeks to broaden students' focus to include less traditional areas. We compared characteristics and academic performance of SC students and non-SC students for the graduating classes of 2010-2014. CONTEXT: Approximately one-third of our students opt to complete an SC during their 4-year undergraduate medical education. Because this program is additional to the regular MD curriculum, we sought to investigate whether SC students sustained the academic achievement of non-SC students while at the same time producing scholarly work as part of the program. OUTCOME: Over 5 years, 35% of students elected to enter the program and approximately 81% of these students completed the program. The parameters that were similar for both SC and non-SC students were age at matriculation, admission route, proportion of undergraduate science majors, and number of undergraduate science courses. Most academic indicators, including United States Medical Licensing Examinations scores, were similar for the two groups; however, SC students achieved more honors in the six core clerkships and were more likely to be inducted into the medical school's two honor societies. Residency specialties selected by graduates in the two groups were similar. SC students published an average of 1.3 peer-reviewed manuscripts per student, higher than the 0.8 manuscripts per non-SC student (p=0.013). CONCLUSIONS: An elective, interdisciplinary scholarly program with a focus beyond traditional biomedical research offers students the opportunity to expand the scope of their medical education without an untoward effect on academic performance or residency placement.

Encouraging scholarship: medical school programs to promote student inquiry beyond the traditional medical curriculum.

Many medical curricula now include programs that provide students with opportunities for scholarship beyond that provided by their traditional, core curricula. These scholarly concentration (SC) programs vary greatly in focus and structure, but they share the goal of producing physicians with improved analytic, creative, and critical-thinking skills. In this article, the authors explore models of both required and elective SC programs. They gathered information through a review of medical school Web sites and direct contact with representatives of individual programs. Additionally, they discuss in-depth the SC programs of the Warren Alpert Medical School of Brown University; the University of South Florida College of Medicine; the University of California, San Francisco; and Stanford University School of Medicine. The authors describe each program's focus, participation, duration, centralization, capstone requirement, faculty involvement, and areas of concentration. Established to address a variety of challenges in the U.S. medical education system, these four programs provide an array of possible models for schools that are considering the establishment of an SC program. Although data on the impact of SC programs are lacking, the authors believe that this type of program has the potential to significantly impact the education of medical students through scholarly, in-depth inquiry and longitudinal faculty mentorship.