Fostering Students' Personal and Professional Growth: Responding to Error During the Internal Medicine Clerkship

Developing professionalism is critical to medical education; accordingly, professionalism curricula may be implemented longitudinally throughout undergraduate medical education. Here we share our experiences addressing student response to medical error as a component of professionalism education during the core clerkship year.

This pretest-posttest study reports medical students' knowledge regarding learning and growing in response to medical error. Students complete an online module, Beyond Recovery: Learning and Growing in the Wake of an Error, during the Internal Medicine Clerkship. We analyzed matched pre- and posttest responses using the Wilcoxon signed-rank test.

Pre- and posttest queries addressed 5 key elements during clinician assessment of medical error: self-expectations of perfection, long-term guilt following an error, likelihood of leaving the medical profession following an error, ability to address error with patients and families, and ability to grow in response to medical error. Results indicate students felt significantly more comfortable after completing the module in key components of managing emotions and responses in the wake of an error.

Benefits observed in medical students' perspectives include improved ability to move forward following medical error, ability to engage with affected patients and families, and capacity to learn from mistakes. Despite these positives, students' high self-expectations of perfectionism were unchanged.