This week we welcomed a new set of interns to the Texas Children’s Hospital residency program. During orientation we offered a digital professionalism orientation that was a lively, facilitated discussion based on some key points made in this YouTube presentation, Digital Smarts. Newly minted second-year resident Joey Spinner did an amazing job corralling our noobs and getting them to open up about the potential pitfalls where medicine meets the digital world.
Hot points: the artificial limitations of a ‘don’t friend patients’ policy; how exactly to handle (or not handle) a question from an established patient in a public place; the difficulty of separating personal and professional social lives.
A couple of take home points:
We really need to talk about this. Interns appear to have had little discussion regarding digital professionalism in medical school. So residency programs have to do double time with respect to catch up training.
Peer-to-peer teaching is critical. Millennials are more trusting of one another. Call me paranoid, but I think they connected with Joey more than me.
Engaged dialog is likely the best medium. Having spoken to residents before in lecture format, group discussion with directed questions and provocative case scenarios seem to be more effective than passive listening for this subject.
Residents use smart phones. Of the 40 something interns (not a typo – we’re the largest pediatric residency in the U.S.), all but 2 used smart phones. I was honestly more interested in those who reported not having a smart phone than those who did.
A 30 minute orientation is not enough to prepare doctors for the digital world. Which is why we had our new ‘terns think about things before they arrived. Training digital professionalism needs to begin in medical school and emerge over the course of residency.
And that’s why we’re leaving none of this to a brief orientation. The residents and myself (group sourced and more them than me) are finalizing a longitudinal curriculum in digital professionalism that will cover all of these issues over the course of their training.
Again, thanks to Dr. Teri Turner for the opportunity to get this dialog going.
{ 2 comments }
I think this is great, Bryan.
How, where, and what we are communicating is more important now than ever before. As doctors, our voices travel farther than we may think. And it will not travel far enough when it counts if there is too much fluff produced.
I completely agree with a longitudinal curriculum. This should be required in every residency if not in every medical school curriculum. When it comes to social media training (for any field, for that manner) it seems that real-time and real-life examples work best. Wouldn’t it be great to have “case studies” of social media interactions every month? The internet is full of good and bad examples to discuss. I recall during training, having to interview a volunteer patient in front of our classmates and that volunteer patient had to critique the interviewer. Hearing the patient’s own experience made a lasting impression and made the learning opportunities more clear for me. So, perhaps even having a volunteer patient offer his/her own impression of certain things online could be helpful.
I’m hesitant to admit this, but as diligent and as careful as I think I am, I am sure I would have made many unintentional mistakes had I been an avid social media user as a student or resident when I first started out in training. Furthermore, I did not really understand how patients actually perceive doctors until I was a few years into practice, when patients and peers and friends of friends and family members relayed stories about doctors in jest or in disgust or in dismay. (You rarely hear this stuff when everyone cheers you on to the finish line of residency.)
This type of curriculum is long over-due and I am looking forward to hearing results and feedback of the efforts.
-Linda
Linda – Thank you for your thoughtful comments. The issue of a volunteer or subjective patient to review a footprint is really interesting.
I might add that this probably should not be restricted to residents or students. I can picture you bringing your wisdom to your organization of practicing physicians.