From Reductionist Skills to Meaningful Learning: Trust and Humility in Bedside Cardiac Assessment

Notions of trust are foundational to competency-based medical education. "Entrustability" underlies assessment; assessment is guided by integration into curricula of learners' knowledge, skills, and attitudes. However, attitudinal notions of trust are not commonly conceptualized as integral to such frameworks. Overlap between concepts of entrustability and trust as an attitude creates opportunity to infuse trust into competency frameworks. We explored how an original bedside cardiac assessment (BCA) curriculum that supported professional attitudes, knowledge, and skills scaffolded clinical learning in a cohort of internal medicine clerkship students.

The curriculum urged students to hear patients' perspectives with humility and as key to diagnostic reasoning. Assigned short videos preceded two facilitated classes that included discussing a patient's startling question, "Why should I trust your clinical skills?" and recognizing, in simulated clinical encounters, disparate patients' perspectives. To better understand their experiences, we asked sixty-seven students to complete two post-class open-ended questions. We analyzed responses using content and thematic analyses.

Emergent codes clustered around themes in two categories: "Successful Learning" around effective learning strategies and meaningful peer encounters, skills practice, and educator encounters; and "Opportunities for Improvement", around instructional design, learning preferences, and instruction-related improvements.

Themes suggested effective learning and meaningful interactions. Comments affirmed the importance of attitudinal aspects of skills development; human interaction while learning; and humility, a linchpin of expertise development and patient-centered communication. All contribute to professional identity formation (PIF). Instructional design improvements were incorporated into the final version of the curriculum. Limitations included inability to examine nuances of emergent themes from the limited data set. We are studying the curriculum's effects on BCA-related knowledge, skills, and attitudes and trust-worthiness as a learning construct. Research opportunities include impacts on humility, patient-centeredness, and PIF. We hope this exploratory work will stimulate conversations around expanded roles of notions of trust in medical education.