ArticleJournal of medical education and curricular development
Stretching the Comfort Zone: Using Early Clinical Contact to Influence Professional Identity Formation in Medical Students.
Article in Journal of medical education and curricular development. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 14 papers.
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Who cites it
14 citing papers in PubMed, 24 citations in OpenAlex.
- Educational Interventions for Professional Identity Formation in Undergraduate Medical Education: A Scoping Review.Cureus · 2026Review
- Developing purposeful observation during early clinical exposure in anesthesiology: a cluster-randomized study.BMC medical education · 2026Article
- Learning from the community: early medical students' territory-based immersion with community health agents in Brazil.BMC medical education · 2026Article
- A Longitudinal Early Patient Encounter Program Through a Lens of Relationship-Centered Care.Journal of general internal medicine · 2025Article
- How near-peer supervisors experience their own development in the supervisor role when shifting from written to oral interactive feedback: a qualitative interview study.BMC medical education · 2025Article
- Medical Students' Experience of a Patient's Death and Their Coping Strategies: A Narrative Literature Review.The American journal of hospice & palliative care · 2025Review
- Transforming self-experienced vulnerability into professional strength: a dialogical narrative analysis of medical students' reflective writing.Advances in health sciences education : theory and practice · 2024Article
- Article
- What can Designing Learning-by-Concordance Clinical Reasoning Cases Teach Us about Instruction in the Health Sciences?Perspectives on medical education · 2023Article
- Optimising planned medical education strategies to develop learners' person-centredness: A realist review.Medical education · 2022Review
- An Innovative Program Using Magic to Provide Early Clinical Experiences for Preclinical Medical Students: Goals, Experiences, and Results of the MagicAid Program.Medical science educator · 2022Article
- A Scoping Review of Professional Identity Formation in Undergraduate Medical Education.Journal of general internal medicine · 2021Article
- The use of text mining to detect key shifts in Japanese first-year medical student professional identity formation through early exposure to non-healthcare hospital staff.BMC medical education · 2021Article
- Empathy variation of undergraduate medical students after early clinical contact: a cross-sectional study in China.BMJ open · 2020Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
5 authors at 3 institutions in 2 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
purposeTo explore first-year medical students' affective reactions to intimate encounters with severely sick patients in their homes, within a curricular innovation targeting the development of a patient-centered professional identity.
backgroundEarly patient encounters create complex emotional challenges and constitute fertile ground for professional identity formation. The literature indicates that students often learn, largely through the hidden curriculum, to avoid and suppress emotion. This can culminate in mental health problems and loss of empathy.
methodA qualitative descriptive analysis of 28 randomly selected, mandatory, reflective essays focused on a home visit to a previously unknown patient, in an unsupervised group of 4 students, within the context of a structured course called Patient Contact-PASKON.
resultsStudents described a wide range of affect-laden responses, positive and negative, elicited by the home visits. The observations were typically related to loss of control, struggles to behave "professionally," and the unmasking of stereotypes and prejudices.
conclusionsMedical students' initial clinical encounters elicit emotional responses that have the potential to serve as triggers for the development of emotional maturity, relational skills, and patient-centered attitudes. Conversely, they can foreground uncertainty and lead to defensive distancing from patients' existential concerns. The findings point to a role for structured educational strategies and supervision to assist students in the emotion work necessary in the transition from a "lay" to a "medical" identity.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.