Changes in role within the medical profession are times of great upheaval. One of the most challenging is the change from being a medical student to a fully qualified doctor. A cohort of medical students qualifies every year around June/July time, and members of this cohort take their first steps on the wards and in clinics as junior doctors each August. Recent guidance has enforced a period of shadowing and induction for all newly qualified junior doctors in the UK before they start their first jobs – in recognition of the fact that schemes with targeted teaching and shadowing can reduce safety incidents by a significant margin.
At other points in the medical hierarchy, there tends to be less focus on the doctors changing from one grade to another. However, at Consultant level, the stakes rise, and organisations often spend a little more time considering how to smooth the transition from trainee to fully independent practitioner. Mentoring – a two way learning process between a senior and junior member of a team, organisation, or even healthcare system – is a concept that many organisations have identified as being beneficial to new consultants, and mentoring programmes exist in a fair number of hospitals. Like many relationship-based exercises, there is a deal of trial and error involved, and mentoring relationships don’t always work out perfectly. A paper in the PMJ recently examined what makes mentoring work for new consultants.
The authors interviewed new consultants and senior leaders within acute hospitals in the Yorkshire and Humber region of England and through thematic analysis, six major themes were identified. These included the protective nature of mentoring – both protective of patients under the care of new consultants, and of the consultants themselves; the mechanics of the process of mentoring (variability in expectations, informal and multiple mentors, the importance of personality in the mentoring relationship) and the prominence of mentoring as part of professional identity.
This last point struck me, and led me to wonder about how different specialties socialise trainees, both in their approach to interpersonal relationships at consultant level, and potentially to much wider aspects of care.
Professional socialisation is a fascinating concept – it has been studied in a diverse range of professions – from the clergy to the military – and within the medical world, plays a huge role in setting the culture of different departments, and probably specialties. One teaching hospital training scheme I know of had a throwaway line at the back of the trainee handbook that spoke volumes about the culture of the specialty: ‘remember, you are an xxxxx-ist : keep it cocky!” This encapsulated perfectly the culture of the trainees in that particular specialty within the region, and I now recognise this as one part of what is commonly held to be the ‘Hidden Curriculum’ of medical education.
The paper examining mentoring schemes mentions that three specialties in particular may lend themselves to more natural mentoring relationships – surgical specialties in general, gastroenterolgy, and anaesthetics. I wonder if the craft nature of these specialties demands a closer supervision during training – where consultants are less willing to let trainees gain experience on their patients unsupervised and therefore engage in more hands-on training, engendering close working relationships? Or perhaps it is less high-brow than this, and the downtime between cases in these procedure and list-based specialties offer the opportunity for trainees and seniors to develop more meaningful relationships than in other specialties where the clinic room, or set-piece ward round is the main arena of interaction – affording less opportunity for relationship building chats and debates.
So, if certain specialties prepare new consultants better for mentoring relationships, and mentoring is thought to be a positive influence on patient and employee safety, do some specialties socialise their workforce to be unsafe, to reject a collegiate approach to work, and impair the personal development of their practitioners? The hidden curriculum is at play in all spheres of medical life, and it pays to look around from time to time to ensure that you aren’t sleepwalking into a culture that is detrimental to the safe conduct of healthcare, but are an active participant in a culture that promotes sharing of lessons, and fosters and develops individuals as they climb the greasy pole of their medical careers.