Humanism: is its evaluation captured in commonly used performance measures?

Area of Science:

• Medical Education
• Humanistic Psychology
• Healthcare Performance Assessment

Background:

• Growing recognition of humanistic behavior's importance in medical education.
• Limited understanding of the relationship between humanism and student performance metrics.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate the correlation between medical student humanism and common performance measures.
• To ascertain if higher humanism scores correlate with better academic and clinical performance.

Main Methods:

• Physician Humanism Scale used to assess 428 students during a Family Medicine clerkship.
• Performance evaluated using standardized patients, preceptors, assignments, and a national knowledge exam.
• Correlation analysis between humanism scores and various performance indicators.

Main Results:

• Humanism scores showed a significant positive correlation with all performance measures, though coefficients were low (0.12-0.31).
• Students in the lowest humanism quartile performed significantly worse across local and national assessments (p < .018).
• Very low humanism scores did not preclude passing other performance evaluations.

Conclusions:

• Humanism is a distinct construct, providing unique information not captured by current performance measures.
• While more humanistic students generally perform better, existing measures may fail to identify those with the lowest humanism.
• Recommends incorporating humanism as a separate, independent performance metric in medical education.