Supporting Professional Identity Development in Healthcare Students

When a new group of students enters your classroom, each of them brings a unique set of beliefs, experiences, backgrounds, and identities with them. Therefore, professional identity development in health profession students begins as early as day one of school and should be fostered throughout their education and beyond.

According to an Academic Psychiatry article, an ideal professional identity “embraces empathy, mindful attention to patient care, integrity, self-awareness, teamwork, beneficence, respect, and equal regard for all, as well as an eagerness to learn, resilience, and attention to self-care.” Health professions educators have the critical role of supporting professional identity development to help students transition into safe and ethical healthcare professionals. The first step is being aware of the strategies, assessments, and possible challenges for professional identity development in the classroom.

Understanding Professional Identity in Healthcare Students

Health profession students can acquire the necessary knowledge and develop the required skills, but if their professional identity is not well-formed, their healthcare practice is affected.

Students must develop a robust professional identity to practice medicine successfully. Some research even argues that the stronger the professional identity, the less chance of burnout – an issue that is prominent in today’s workforce. Health professionals grounded in their identity benefit from enhanced resilience, a sense of belonging, and well-being within a community of practice.

Similar to gaining new theoretical and clinical knowledge and skills, healthcare students face challenges in developing their professional identity, which is expected since professional identity development is a lifelong journey.

As an educator, you can create a positive learning environment and integrate professional identity into the curriculum to help students overcome these challenges.

The Educator’s Role in Supporting Professional Identity

Educators impact healthcare students and their ability to form a professional identity. Attending a health profession school is often an individual’s first significant experience within the healthcare profession, so they naturally look towards their teachers for guidance, answers, role-modeling, and more to help envision themselves as a future clinician. This is why creating a positive learning environment is crucial for supporting professional identity.

Fostering a culture of respect and collaboration among yourself, your students, and their peers will create a positive learning environment. Additionally, encouraging open communication where any question or concern can be addressed without worry of failure or judgment creates a positive environment.

Integrating professional identity development into the curriculum and explicitly telling students about it is critical. However, reliance on a competency-based curriculum leaves out the social and relational aspects required to form a professional identity. When you incorporate reflective exercises and include role-modeling opportunities in your curriculum, you shift the focus from training students to do the work of a physician to being one.

Challenges in Professional Identity Development

As an educator, you may face challenges when helping students develop their professional identity, but with the right approach, you can overcome them. Common challenges educators face include:

The general vastness of teaching about professionalism can be overwhelming.
Teaching professionalism that goes against the negative role models students encounter in-person, online, or on television.
“Hidden curriculum” or things not explicitly taught by educators that may at times model unprofessional characteristics,
The difficulty of giving feedback to students in terms of values vs behaviors.

Suppose you face resistance or reluctance from healthcare students in terms of reflecting on and building upon their professional identity. In that case, it’s important to remind them that professional identity development ultimately leads to well-being in their future careers.

The article, Professional Identity Formation: Linking Meaning to Well-Being, argues a well-developed and adaptive professional identity strengthens a medical student’s coherence, purpose, and significance. These three components enhance a medical student’s “experiences of meaning, and in doing so, supports their general well-being.”

Strategies for Professional Identity Development

How do you ensure professional identity development is incorporated into your curriculum? As new professional identity development research is published, you can improve and adapt your teaching methods to build upon the existing curriculum and knowledge surrounding the topic.

The recently published article, Developing Professional Identity Among Undergraduate Medical Students in a Competency-Based Curriculum: Educators’ Perspective, suggests nine components of professional identity development and pedagogical approaches to enhance it. A few examples include:

To increase teamwork development in your medical students, you can provide problem-based learning, case-based learning, team-based learning, Clinical simulations, and Interprofessional education opportunities in your teachings.
To foster resilience in students, you can provide small-group discussions addressing burnout, trained faculty mentorships, and self-reflection on these concepts.

The following strategies dig deeper into mentorship, reflection, and clinical experience to help guide your efforts.

Mentoring and Guidance

Effective mentorship and guidance not only help professional identity development but also research participation and productivity, career planning, student well-being, and reduction of burnout. As an educator, you can establish mentorship programs and provide personalized guidance to students in both clinical and nonclinical settings.

Reflective Practice

When students use self-reflection practice, they decide which values, attitudes, and behaviors to adopt and integrate into who they are as healthcare professionals. Without self-reflection, a student may enter the workforce not knowing their strengths and weaknesses or how to be a life-long learner. You can incorporate reflective exercises into the curriculum with written reflections, small group work, case-based learning, and inquiry-based teaching.

Exposure to Diverse Clinical Experiences

Socialization is a theme found in the research about professional identity development. Students need to primarily interact with members of the medical profession to develop their professional identities. Unfortunately, this will include exposure to health professions faculty who show inappropriate behaviors, perform their jobs unethically, and discriminate against others.

The more exposure students have to diverse clinical experiences, the more opportunities they have to witness health professionals with identities worth emulating. Offering a variety of clinical rotations to students and exposing them to different specialties and practice settings helps.

Assessing Professional Identity Development

Professional identity development practices need to be assessed to ensure health profession students’ progress and to catch any concerns that may arise.

When you think of healthcare education, it’s easy to rely on assessments that give grades. However, a mixture of formative and summative assessments should be used to track professional identity progress.

For example, you can incorporate self-assessment and peer evaluation as a formative assessment. This allows for a low-stress environment in which students take the time to reflect on their professionalism and receive helpful feedback from peers. Students respond positively to this type of assessment because the fear of their actions and efforts to receive another grade is diminished.

An additional part of your overall assessment as an educator is noticing any unacceptable behaviors. If these behaviors are left uncorrected, then they could negatively affect professional identity development.

If you identify poor behavior, holding a meeting to address concerns, explain what is acceptable, and develop an explicit remediation plan is a good idea. The student should be told what the possible consequences are for not improving. You should follow up frequently to check on progress, praise improvements, and discuss ways the student can continue to advance.

Looking Ahead

Professional identity development is a lifelong learning endeavor achieved through medical school and beyond. Your classroom atmosphere and the healthcare curriculum you choose can help produce a safe and ethical healthcare workforce that understands the responsibilities and core values of the profession.

Interested in how Osmosis from Elsevier can support clinical education in your school’s program? Schedule a call today.