Abstract
BackgroundThe hidden curriculum represents influences occurring within the culture of medicine that indirectly alter medical professionals’ interactions, beliefs and clinical practices throughout their training. One approach to increase medical student awareness of the hidden curriculum is to provide them with readily available examples of how it is enacted in medicine; as such the purpose of this study was to examine depictions of the hidden curriculum in popular medical television programs.MethodsOne full season of ER, Grey’s Anatomy and Scrubs were selected for review. A summative content analysis was performed to ascertain the presence of depictions of the hidden curriculum, as well as to record the type, frequency and quality of examples. A second reviewer also viewed a random selection of episodes from each series to establish coding reliability.ResultsThe most prevalent themes across all television programs were: the hierarchical nature of medicine; challenges during transitional stages in medicine; the importance of role modeling; patient dehumanization; faking or overstating one’s capabilities; unprofessionalism; the loss of idealism; and difficulties with work-life balance.ConclusionsThe hidden curriculum is frequently depicted in popular medical television shows. These examples of the hidden curriculum could serve as a valuable teaching resource in undergraduate medical programs.Electronic supplementary materialThe online version of this article (doi:10.1186/s12909-015-0437-8) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.
Highlights
The hidden curriculum represents influences occurring within the culture of medicine that indirectly alter medical professionals’ interactions, beliefs and clinical practices throughout their training
While we did not rate exemplars based on our interpretation of how realistic they were, our findings suggest that enactments of the hidden curriculum in medical dramas may reflect some healthcare realities
One cannot rule out the possibility that the depictions collected in these three television shows may not be a true representation of North American healthcare, and not reflect a true hidden curriculum that parallels one in actual medical institutions. We argue that such an inherent limitation merits consideration, despite overlap of similar themes identified in other studies examining the hidden curriculum among medical students [12, 13]
Summary
The hidden curriculum represents influences occurring within the culture of medicine that indirectly alter medical professionals’ interactions, beliefs and clinical practices throughout their training. The realities of the hidden curriculum are dynamic in nature and shaped by structural processes and by the ability of medical educators to consider and recognize their existence [6]. This differs from the informal curriculum, which takes place in interpersonal forms of teaching, such as among medical faculty and students. Such teaching is typically unscripted and ad hoc in nature [1,2,3,4,5,6]. Both the hidden curriculum and informal curriculum suggest the existence of a
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