Academic medicine : journal of the Association of American Medical Colleges
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To review the literature on the social and learning environments experienced by underrepresented minority (URM) medical students to determine what type of interventions are needed to eliminate potential barriers to enrolling and retaining URM students. ⋯ For URM students, an adverse climate may be decreasing the attractiveness of careers in medicine, impairing their academic performance, and increasing attrition. Improvements to the social and learning environments experienced by URM students are needed to make medicine a more inclusive profession. The current environment of health care reform creates an opportunity for institutions to implement strategies to achieve this goal.
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Given recent emphasis on professionalism training in medical schools by accrediting organizations, medical ethics and humanities educators need to develop a comprehensive understanding of this emphasis. To achieve this, the Project to Rebalance and Integrate Medical Education (PRIME) II Workshop (May 2011) enlisted representatives of the three major accreditation organizations to join with a national expert panel of medical educators in ethics, history, literature, and the visual arts. PRIME II faculty engaged in a dialogue on the future of professionalism in medical education. ⋯ The third theme focuses on how ethics and humanities educators must have unity of vision and purpose in order to collaborate and identify how their disciplines advance professionalism. These themes should help shape discussions of the future of medical ethics and humanities teaching. The authors argue that improvement of the ethics and humanities-based knowledge, skills, and conduct that fosters professionalism should enhance patient care and be evaluated for its distinctive contributions to educational processes aimed at producing this outcome.