Academic medicine : journal of the Association of American Medical Colleges
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To determine the accuracy of admission committee members' predictions regarding which applicants are likely to become generalists, and to determine which applicant characteristics are used and should be used in making these predictions. ⋯ Admission committee members often made inaccurate predictions about applicants' career plans. This may be because they based their judgments on applicants' characteristics that were not significantly related to the students' career plans at graduation.
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Medical schools have been slow to include meaningful end-of-life (EOL) educational experiences in their curricula. As an area of inquiry and focused clinical experience, death is "conspicuous" by its absence, reflecting a medical culture that defines death as failure. The author asked fourth-year medical students at one institution to describe their experiences with dying patients and their families, the skills and attitudes they brought to these encounters, the support they received from attendings and residents while caring for dying patients, and suggestions for the medical curriculum that would help prepare them for care of the dying. ⋯ However, while they did wish for more support and role modeling from residents and attendings, they generally believed that care of the dying can be learned only through direct clinical experience. These beliefs call into question curricular issues of placement of EOL inquiry--most often in the preclinical curriculum--and the teaching of its content, currently overwhelmingly by lectures. The author concludes with recommendations for thoughtful, integrative, interdisciplinary curriculum changes in EOL education.