Making narrative feedback meaningful

Narrative written feedback given to students by faculty often fails to identify areas for improvement and recommended actions to lead to this improvement. When these elements are missing, it is challenging for students to improve and for medical schools to use narrative feedback in promotion decisions, to guide coaching plans and to pass on meaningful information to residency programs. Large-group faculty development has improved narrative written feedback, but less is known about individualised faculty development to supplement large-group sessions. To fill this gap, we built a curriculum with general and individualised faculty development to improve narrative written feedback from Internal Medicine faculty to clerkship students.

We used Kern's steps to build a curriculum with general and individualised one-on-one faculty development to improve the problem of inadequate narrative written feedback. We used a novel narrative feedback rubric for pre and post-intervention faculty scores.

Through general and individualised one-on-one faculty development with peer comparison scores, we were able to improve narrative written feedback from 3.7/6 to 4.6/6, for an increase of 23%.

We found our faculty development program effective in improving feedback and was easy to implement. Our rubric was easy to use, and faculty were receptive to feedback in one-on-one meetings. We plan to extend this work locally to other divisions/departments and into graduate medical education; it should also be easily extended to other medical disciplines or health professions.