Medical Student Mistreatment in Clinical Education
Summary
Medical student mistreatment remains a pervasive challenge, manifesting as verbal abuse, humiliation, discrimination and neglect during clinical rotations. This phenomenon is shaped by entrenched hierarchies and a culture that equates rigorous training with resilience. Negative interactions not only impair students’ learning and professional development but also harm mental health and undermine patient care. Barriers to reporting include fear of reprisal, ambiguity over what constitutes mistreatment and distrust in institutional processes. Programmatic efforts to address mistreatment have ranged from policy reforms and accountability measures to educational interventions, yet evidence of sustained cultural change is limited. Global studies highlight regional variations in prevalence and form, underscoring the need for context-sensitive strategies. Promising approaches involve collaborative student-faculty initiatives, anonymous reporting channels and targeted training to foster respectful learning environments and improve well-being among future clinicians.
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Medical Student Mistreatment in Clinical Education publication trend
The graph below shows the total number of articles in medical student mistreatment in clinical education across all publications each year (not limited to Nature Index journals).
Technical terms
Mistreatment: Unacceptable behaviours that harm medical students’ well-being or learning, including harassment, abuse and humiliation.
Incivility: Low-intensity deviant actions such as rude or dismissive conduct that undermine the educational environment.
Psychometric properties: Statistical characteristics, such as reliability and validity, that measure the quality of an assessment tool.
Item response theory (IRT): A modern statistical framework analysing individual item performance within a measurement scale.
References
- New psychometric evidence for the thesis advisor abuse scale (EMAT) in Peruvian university students based on classic and modern procedures. Heliyon (2024).
- Incivility in medical education: a scoping review. BMC Medical Education (2023).
- Exploring medical students’ barriers to reporting mistreatment during clerkships: a qualitative study. Medical Education Online (2018).
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