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Annual Meeting 2019 Presentations

TOTB-04: PEER-ELECTED OMBUDSMAN FOR REAL-TIME IMPROVEMENT OF THE SURGERY CLERKSHIP EXPERIENCE
Andrew Walid Mezher, BS; Creighton University School of Medicine

 

What problem in education is addressed by this work?:
To promote anonymity, clerkships are typically evaluated by students at the end of the rotation and feedback is given to directors at the end of the year. Concerns that could be resolved in real time, during a rotation, go unrecognized and un-repaired until subsequent rotation groups or classes enter the clerkship. Learning environments must be adaptable and open to iterative change to meet the needs of the modern student.

Describe the intervention:
A peer-elected ombudsman receives real-time feedback through an anonymous, online virtual suggestion box from surgery clerkship students with specific curriculum or clerkship experience concerns (e.g., communication conflicts, specific lectures, duty hour discrepancies, protected study time). The ombudsman then does due diligence to discern the exact nature of the problem and proposes possible solutions. Finally, in collaboration with the clerkship director, an action plan is promptly implemented to resolve the original issue, a result which validates this process of student-driven change and, ultimately, empowers students to advocate for their own medical education.

Describe how this intervention could be applied at other institutions. Please specifically comment on identified barriers that could exist and how they could be overcome:
The greatest challenge to adopting this strategy of continuous clerkship improvement is the vulnerability imposed on the clerkship director by a partnership with a student who is tasked with receiving typically confidential clerkship feedback. To mitigate this concern, a clerkship director may coordinate the election process specifically with candidates that display interest in pursuing a career in surgery (e.g., involving the institution’s surgery club/interest group). We have presented this idea to our institution’s Education Steering Committee, and it seems that this intervention can be universally adopted by other clerkships and residency programs as well.