Student perceptions of medical errors: Incorporating an explicit professionalism curriculum in the third-year surgery clerkship

Among medical educators, there is a universal call for curricula that emphasize development of character, compassion, and integrity. A unique challenge to the development of such curricula is the lack of tools with which to assess student progress. To these ends, we created a curriculum designed to inculcate the values of the surgical profession alongside both fact-based and skill-based learning within the triad of medical school education. Our purposes were 1) the acknowledgment of student fears regarding committing medical errors during their third-year surgical clerkship and 2) the design of curricular content aimed toward a more comprehensive understanding of professionalism using medical error as a paradigm. Third-year clerks on the surgical service were assigned readings, participated in formalized discussions regarding medical errors and ethics, and were required to complete questionnaires that contained open-ended questions pertaining to their concerns, observations, and reactions toward any perceived or actual medical errors they encountered during the third-year surgical clerkship. Questionnaires were analyzed according to themes contained within the students' responses. Most Students expressed an initial fear of committing primarily technical medical errors and subsequently causing harm to patients. The dilemma as to whether to speak up against a superior regarding unaddressed medical errors appeared as a frequent theme among the Students. New prerotation and postrotation questionnaires have been designed to allow for both quantitative and qualitative analysis of the students' understanding of the gravity of varying types of medical errors and how they relate to medical professionalism.