See No Evil, Hear No Evil, Stop No Evil: Institutional-Level Tracking to Combat Mistreatment of Residents and Fellows

Mistreatment of trainees, including discrimination and harassment, is a problem in graduate medical education. Current tools to assess the prevalence of mistreatment often are not administered institutionally and may not account for multiple sources of mistreatment, limiting an institution's ability to respond and intervene.

We describe the utility of a brief questionnaire, embedded within longer institutional program evaluations, measuring the prevalence of different types of trainee mistreatment from multiple sources, including supervisors, team members, colleagues, and patients.

In 2018, we administered a modified version of the mistreatment questions in the Association of American Medical Colleges Graduation Questionnaire to investigate the prevalence and sources of mistreatment in graduating residents and fellows. We conducted analyses to determine the prevalence, types, and sources of mistreatment of trainees at the institutional level across graduate medical education programs.

A total of 234 graduating trainees (77%) from the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities completed the questions. Patients were cited as the primary source of mistreatment in 5 of 6 categories, including both direct and indirect offensive remarks, microaggressions, sexual harassment, and physical threats (paired t test comparisons from t = 3.92 to t = 9.71, all P < .001). The only category of mistreatment in which patients were not the most significant source was humiliation and shaming.

Six questions concerning types and sources of trainee mistreatment, embedded within an institutional survey, generated new information for institutional-, departmental- and program-based future interventions. Patients were the greatest source for all types of mistreatment except humiliation and shaming.