Funding : The Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada
Principal Investigator: Dr. Jason M. Harley
Co-Investigators: Dr. Liane Feldman and Prof. Nigel Mantou Lou
Collaborators: Dr. Jean-Sébastien Pelletier, Dr. Ning-Zi Sun, and Leah Moss, PhD
Project Description:
Harassment, defined as unwanted, unwelcome or uninvited behaviour that makes a person feel humiliated, intimated or offended, has an alarmingly high incidence in health professions education. Harassment is associated with increased trainee drop out and decreased learning and well-being. This is an especially dire problem, presently, given both the shortage of healthcare workers and this populations' high incidence of psychological distress. Harassment is an obstacle to increasing the number of Canadian healthcare workers, making changes to improve their learning and working environment, and continuing to diversify our healthcare work force.
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 the paucity of studies that provide training on strategies to combat harassment. Learning such skills require opportunities to not just passively learn, but actively apply skills in a safe, simulated learning environment. While simulations are popular for skills training in health professions education, including difficult interpersonal ones, they have not been used in educational interventions about harassment.
The objectives of this grant are to address the above-mentioned gaps and problems by redesigning a pilot version of an instructional intervention funded by a SSHRC IDG to provide medical trainees with information about harassment, tips for how to deal with it, and to practice implementing harassment combatting strategies during a standardized simulation. Our second aim is to examine how, when, and why medical residents respond to witnessing harassment the way they do. Our third aim is to compare harassment reporting roles and rates from resident programs and cohorts who have taken our training to those who have not.
