Healer's Perspective: A Course for Medical Students

Healer's Perspective was a course on Zoom developed from the Sanford Summer Leadership Academy. The five, one-hour sessions were held during the fall of 2022 and was student-led. Thirty-seven students from the Sanford School of Medicine class of 2025 participated in this course.

The sessions covered topics including emotional intelligence and Myers-Briggs, professionalism and boundaries in medicine, self-care, servant leadership, and adaptive leadership. Each session started with a five-to-ten-minute introduction to everyone, followed by dispersing into break-out rooms to further discuss in small groups. A survey was done before the first session and after the last session to ask participants their perception of how applicable each topic was to their physician development and their confidence in each topic covered. Students ranked each session's importance and their confidence of the topic on a scale of one to five.

Students' perceptions on how applicable each topic is to their physician development averaged at 4.782/5 at the start of the course and increased to 4.902/5 after the course. This showed an average increase of 2.4% in how students felt about each topic and its importance to their future careers. Students' confidence in each topic began at an average of 3.444/5 at the start of the course and increased to an average of 4.21/5 after the course. This showed an average of 15.32% increase in each student's confidence in their knowledge of the topic covered.

This course increased students' confidence in each of the topics by an average of 15.32% after five, one-hour Zoom sessions about each topic. There is potential for this course to be offered as course credit to future classes and an opportunity to build upon this knowledge for students who participated in this course.