Abby Spencer
VC Education; Director Academy of Educators, Medical School
- Email: abbys@nospam.wustl.edu
In the era of competency based medical education, it has never been more important to ensure that the feedback delivered to learners in the clinical environment is equitable, just, delivered with the intent to improve performance, devoid of bias, and useful to the learner. Unfortunately, we bring our biases with us into the learning environment, and may inadvertently judge our learners based on their appearance or commonality of experience with us. Faculty bias can influence the type and amount of feedback given to learners. Shared background or lived experiences may predict a willingness to deliver more feedback to one group of learners over others. Faculty may have a limited skillset to provide equitable feedback to a diverse population of learners. Moreover, faculty skills may also be limited in accurately diagnosing the learner and teasing out the skills and behavior requiring feedback when bias is at play. While systems and societal level fixes are crucial, our project seeks to affect this disparity at the level of faculty and interprofessional team members who provide feedback to students and residents in clinical spaces in Medicine. Our project proposal is to create and implement a novel faculty development series to enhance equitable delivery of clinical feedback.