Student sceptics: key partners for teaching professionalism

摘要

Context and setting This report focuses on the significance of a student advisory committee as astrategy for supporting and evaluating a curriculum that focuses on professional formation as a doctor and a method for teaching about professional practice.After a year of operating the new 'Professional Competency Curriculum' (ProComp) at McMaster University, Hamilton, Ontario, it appeared that there was a significant gap between the acceptance of the new programme by its 'longitudinal facilitators' (a newly created role) and the students themselves. The experienced clinician pairs who facilitated the weekly sessions with groups of 10 students readily grasped the significance of ethics, communication skills, self-awareness and population health (some of the core pillars of ProComp) to successful clinical practice. However, students early in their; training had more difficulty with the relevance of these topics and were often frustrated by what they perceived as 'soft' content competing for time with 'hard'sciences.