Learning Transfer in Practice: A Qualitative Study of Medical Professionals’ Perspectives

Abstract

This article explores how medical professionals’ understanding of their own profession relates to their learning transfer. Based on qualitative interviews with medical professionals participating in a mind–body medicine training program, we examined the rationales provided by medical professionals for their decisions on whether to integrate new learning in their current and future clinical practice. The findings show that medical professionals’ beliefs and values about the profession of medicine and knowledge of the wider healthcare system affect their decisions concerning applying what they had learned in practice. Specifically, (a) medical professionals’ prior beliefs and developing understandings of the purpose of the profession, (b) their prior beliefs and developing understandings of good clinical practice, and (c) their understandings of clinical practice as a marketplace geared to client satisfaction and regulated by the healthcare system are critical to understanding how they decided to transfer what they had learned and to make changes in their practices. Based on the findings, implications for research and practice are proposed.

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“…These findings from their qualitative study suggest that we could expand our measure of transfer to examine whether trainees seek out new situations to apply a certain trained KSA, while at the same time deciding to discard other trained KSAs after an initial attempt. Choi and Roulston () interviewed medical school residents and examined transfer criteria in terms of continuous learning. They discovered that subjects’ professional identity and prior positive or negative view toward the training material influenced the extent to which they took advantage of other elective (versus mandatory) training in the same content area as well as the extent to which they were proactive in gaining further information concerning the evidence base for the medical efficacy of the trained procedure.…”

Criteria for Evaluating Qualitative Research

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