Contributor: Karthiha Raveenthiran
Summary:
As a physician, especially in Family Medicine, curiosity is a key aspect to understanding patients’ unique illness experiences, building rapport and respectful relationships with patients, deepening self-awareness, supporting clinical reasoning, avoiding diagnostic premature closure, and encouraging lifelong learning. In preparing learners for Family Medicine, an unspoken task of the clinical preceptor is to foster curiosity.
There are many threats to learner curiosity during medical training. Often, the transition to clinical learning can lead students to stifle their curiosity. This presents a significant challenge in the clinical learning environment, where students feel the burden to perform instead of the opportunity to learn.
However, there are time-efficient ways that clinical preceptors can promote curiosity during daily supervision through modeling and sharing certain techniques. Three practical strategies and key phrases associated with each to address learner curiosity are highlighted below.
Take Away Tidbits:
- Negative working conditions such as competing stresses and cognitive loads are often impractical for clinical preceptors to eliminate, yet can threaten learners’ attention and well-being.
- Conversely, motivational factors, such as curiosity, can be nurtured by clinical preceptors through a few concrete and time-efficient strategies.
- Efficient and artful primary care often means embracing uncertainty. Modeling curiosity with “I wonder …” statements puts a gentle social stress on learners to connect with their own curiosity.
- Picking a case per clinic and showing how the ordinary can be extraordinary can foster curiosity and be a powerful tool in illustrating the art of medicine.
- Preceptors can promote “seeing narrative” rather than only documenting data; although this approach is more resource-intensive, requiring supervision or the learner to shadow the supervisor, it can also be more powerful.
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