Introduction The COVID‐19 pandemic has caused unprecedented stress to the medical education community, potentially worsening problems like burnout and work‐life imbalance that its members have long been grappling with. However, the collective struggle sparked by the pandemic could generate the critical reflection necessary for transforming professional values and practices for the better. In this hermeneutic phenomenological study, we explore how the community is adapting—and even reconceptualising —their personal and professional roles amidst the COVID‐19 crisis. Method Between April and October 2020, we conducted 27 (17F, 10M) semi‐structured interviews with medical trainees (8), physicians (8), graduate students (3) and PhD scientists (8) working in medical education in Canada, the United States and Switzerland. Data analysis involved a variety of strategies, including coding for van Manen's four lifeworld existentials, reflexive writing and multiple team meetings. Results Participants experienced grief related to the loss of long‐established personal and professional structures and boundaries, relationships and plans for the future. However, experiences of grief were often conflicting. Some participants also experienced moments of relief , perceiving some losses as metaphorical permissions slips to slow down and focus on their well‐being. In turn, many reflected on the opportunity they were being offered to re‐imagine the nature of their work. Discussion Participants' experiences with grief, relief and opportunity resonate with Ratcliffe's account of grief as a process of relearning the world after a significant loss. The dismantling of prior life structures and possibilities incited in participants critical reflection on the nature of the medical education community's professional practices. Participants demonstrated their desire for more flexibility and autonomy in the workplace and a re‐adjustment of the values and expectations inherent to their profession. On both individual and systems levels, the community must ensure that long‐standing calls for wellness and work‐life integration are realised—and persist—after the pandemic is over.
Insights: Engaging deeply with the philosophical questions of cadaver-based simulation (CBS) helped us conceptualize the lifecycle as a series of meaningful and purposeful acts of becoming.Following the cadaver from program entry to interment allowed us to contemplate how its ontological ambiguity shapes every aspect of cadaver-based simulation. We found that in discussions of fidelity in medical simulation, beyond both the physical and functional, it is possible to conceive of a third type: ontological. The humanness of the cadaver makes CBS a unique, irreplaceable, and inherently philosophical, practice.
What makes us human? Is it a question that matters? Luong et al. explore these questions in the latest instalment of “When I Say…”
The COVID-19 pandemic has disrupted the international medical education community in unprecedented ways. The restrictions imposed to control the spread of the virus have upended our routines and forced us to reimagine our work structures, educational programming and delivery of patient care in ways that will likely continue to change how we live and work for the foreseeable future. Yet, despite these interruptions, the pandemic has additionally sparked a transformative impulse in some to actively engage in critical introspection around the future of their work, compelling us to consider what changes could (and perhaps should) occur after the pandemic is over. Drawing on key concepts associated with scholar Paulo Freire’s critical pedagogy, this paper serves as a call to action, illuminating the critical imaginings that have come out of this collective moment of struggle and instability, suggesting that we can perhaps create a more just, compassionate world even in the wake of extraordinary hardship.
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