The following blog was co-authored by: Atipong Pathanasethpong and Rosawan Areemit

Academic dishonesty plagues universities around the world, from the US to Taiwan to Australia and beyond. In this blog we would like to discuss ways to address it by employing educational concepts and frameworks to shape a culture and environment that reward honesty and reduce incentives for dishonesty. 

The medical education environment offers a variety of opportunities for dialogue education learning tasks.  Dialogue education is an intentional design framework that fosters communication, reflection, and community in the learning environment.   Using this framework, educators can structure dialogue with students through learning experiences or “tasks” designed to assess prior knowledge, introduce new content, give learners a chance to practice, and thenhelp them integrate the new knowledge or skill (Vella, 2000).   Jane Vella’s concept of learning task design includes what she refers to as the 4 I’s: 

My heart sank as I quickly scanned the list of speakers at the conference. I recognized the names of faculty whom I respected and admired, many of whom are local, state, and national leaders in their fields. What business did I have speaking at such a conference? Surely one of them would attend my talk, detect a fatal error, and spread the word that I had advanced this far in my career by chance alone and didn’t deserve my merits. Does this story seem familiar to you? If so, you may be suffering from “perceived fraudulence,” otherwise known as “impostor syndrome.”

Authors: HMI Chat team

 This #HMIchat moderated by Jeff Wong (@jwonguprcmeded) and Mark Stephens (@mbstephensmd), from Penn State Hershey (@PennStHershey), in January 2018 focused on #DesignThinking in medical education (#MedEd) and health professions education (#HPE). This topic especially hit home with the HMI Chat team (@teresasoro @kreutermd and me (@erhall1)) given #DesignThinking is grounded in “abductive logic” which facilitates a growth mindset of “what might be” rather than “what might have been.” The @HarvardMacy #HMIChat community wholeheartedly embraces a “what might be” approach and imagines the possibilities as we wrestle with hot topics in medical education with subject matter experts and international colleagues. 

During my attendance at the Harvard Macy Institute Health Care Education 2.0 course, I was surprised when we were asked to participate in a mindfulness exercise every morning. I must admit that I wasn’t comfortable with the idea of spending time focusing on my breathing when I could be utilizing that time to work or learn. As the course carried on, I began to realize how we, as professionals, can be so focused on outcomes that we lose track of the journey, and how it affects us. 

While healthcare providers, with their rigorous selection process and training, are expected to be resilient under significant physical and emotional stress, the numbers say quite the opposite. Levels of burnout (exhaustion of physical or emotional strength and lack of motivation) among healthcare providers are increasing every year, and have reached nearly 60% in some disciplines. Rates of provider distress (burnout, anxiety, depression, and suicide) are higher than the general population. These numbers have implications beyond the affected healthcare provider, as studies have associated providers in distress with inferior quality of care, increased errors, decreased patient satisfaction, and even increased patient mortality.