What is an appropriate social scenario for staff and students at an Australian Rural Clinical School? A survey of fourth and fifth year medical student and #8217;s resident in rural Tasmania.

Abstract

Introduction:The degree of comfort that medical students have in different social settings with staff and faculty has not been documented. Methods: We undertook in 2012 a survey of 53, 4 th and 5 th year medical students at the University of Tasmanian Rural Clinical School to determine the incidence of previous inappropriate social invitations/interactions and perceptions of comfort to five different hypothetical social scenarios of different appropriateness. Results: Two students had received what they considered to be an inappropriate invitation. Most students were comfortable with communal public social situations. However, in an overt "date" scenario eight students were either completely at ease with or comfortable. 18 students although uncomfortable with this scenario would still attend and only 14 students would decline the invitation. Conclusion: There needs to be increased awareness that certain social interactions between health professionals when there is significant difference in hierarchy may not always be appropriate. for dinner. Anecdotally faculty felt that this was a hospitable act and one of welcome to students, whereas students sometimes felt uncomfortable with such invitations and certainly felt that they could not decline them. Faced with this dilemma one of the faculty member and a group of students decided to survey both staff and faculty about their attitudes to a variety of social situations of different appropriateness. The aim of the survey was to determine if there were differences between what staff and faculty viewed as appropriate social situations. METHODSApproval to undertake this study was granted from the Tasmanian Human Research Ethics Committee as a low risk study (H0012347). The survey used a simple Likert scale and was given separately to both 4 th year and 5 th year students during a group learning week in 2012. The survey was in two parts. The first part asked questions about the respondent's actual experiences with student and faculty social situations. The second part of the survey was a set of five different hypothetical social situations of different appropriateness, ranging from communal public gatherings to at the other extreme a one on one situation that subjectively could be interpreted as a "date." Both the questions and scenarios were derived by an iterative process between the student researchers.The survey was undertaken at the Tasmanian RCS in Burnie, Tasmania. Senior faculty did not allow the students to survey the faculty. Due to the small number of potential respondents, at a single site, the survey was intended for use as a pilot to validate the survey questionnaire (Appendix 1) with a view to application throughout the Australian RCS network in a more definitive study. The results were entered into an excel spreadsheet and descriptive statistics were used to display the frequency of response to each social situation. RESULTSThere were 53 responses to the survey from students (100% response rate) 27 being 4 th years and 26 being 5 th years. There ...