Funded by:Â The Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada
PI:Â Dr. Jason M. Harley
Co-app:Â Dr. Liane Feldman
°ä´Ç±ô±ô²¹²ú´Ç°ù²¹³Ù´Ç°ù²õ:ÌýDr. Gerald M. Fried and Dr. Nathan C. Hall
Project Description:
Harassment has an alarmingly high incidence in health sciences education and has a negative impact on student dropout, learning, and wellbeing. Moreover, students from underrepresented backgrounds in health sciences education (e.g., women) are especially vulnerable, meaning that harassment also threatens initiatives to support diversity in the next generation of health sciences professionals (e.g., doctors). Despite harassment being a known problem for decades, there is no sign of improvement. One potential reason is the lack of intervention studies in the literature and tendency of existing intervention studies to lack methodological rigor and to focus on helping students internally cope better with harassment. The literature suggests, however, that learning to cope with a bad situation doesn’t change it: strategies involving concrete action are also needed.
Learning such skills require opportunities to not just passively learn, but actively apply skills in a safe, simulated situation. While simulations are popular for skills training in health sciences education, including difficult interpersonal ones, they have not been used in educational interventions about harassment. The objectives of this grant are to address the abovementioned gaps and problems by: (1) developing an instructional intervention to provide students with information about harassment, tips for how to deal with it, and practice implementing harassment combatting strategies during a standardized simulation. (2) the grant also aims to evaluate the effectiveness of this educational intervention to increase medical students’ (a) ability and (b) motivation to effectively combat harassment.
