Abstract
The teaching of professional roles in medical education is an interdisciplinary concern. However, surgeons require specific standards of professionalism for certain context-based situations. In addition to communication, studies require collaboration, leadership, error-/conflict-management, patient-safety and decision-making as essential competencies for surgeons. Standards for corresponding competencies are defined in special chapters of the German National Competency-based Learning Objectives for Undergraduate Medical Education (NKLM; chapter 8, 10). The current study asks whether these chapters are adequately taught in surgical curricula. Eight German faculties contributed to analysing mapping data considering surgical courses of undergraduate programs. All faculties used the MERlin mapping platform and agreed on procedures for data collection and processing. Sub-competency and objective coverage, as well as the achievement of the competency level were mapped. Overall counts of explicit citations were used for analysis. Collaboration within the medical team is a strongly represented topic. In contrast, interprofessional cooperation, particularly in healthcare sector issues is less represented. Patient safety and dealing with errors and complications is most emphasized for the Manager/Leader, while time management, career planning and leadership are not addressed. Overall, the involvement of surgery in teaching the competencies of the Collaborator and Manager/Leader is currently low. However, there are indications of a curricular development towards explicit teaching of these roles in surgery. Moreover, implicitly taught roles are numerous, which indicates a beginning awareness of professional roles.
Highlights
The teaching of professional roles in medical education is an interdisciplinary issue, as all relevant and typical facets of tasks in physicians’ daily practice are concerned
The frequencies of the individual sub-competencies are shown in the context of the total overall number of citations for the corresponding chapter resulting in relative frequency values for the sub-competencies
The current study questions whether the contents of the Collaborator and Manager are sufficiently taught in surgical curricula, including all obligatory surgical courses
Summary
The teaching of professional roles in medical education is an interdisciplinary issue, as all relevant and typical facets of tasks in physicians’ daily practice are concerned. Studies investigating the need for psychosocial skills in surgery point to collaboration, leadership, patient safety, including mainly error- and conflict management, as well as decision-making as essential needs in addition to communication [7,8,9,10,11,12]. Frank et al described only the post-graduate teaching of collaboration, communication, management and advocacy [14]. Based on these findings and in view of the increasing public concern about surgical competencies [7], it is fundamental to develop a defined explicit basic level of competency early in surgical education. Cognitive skills such as problem anticipation and decision-making are necessary to improve technical performance [15]
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