Recalibrating Self-Assessment: Navigating Imposter Syndrome Through Metacognitive Reflection.

Background: Accurate self-assessment is foundational for life-long learning, professional development and patient safety, yet many learners struggle to develop this fundamental skill. Even skilled self-assessors-or savvy calibrators-may sometimes struggle with self-assessment accuracy, particularly during professional transitions and challenges. This study explored the metacognitive processes employed by high-performing physicians to maintain or recalibrate accurate self-assessment across diverse professional contexts.

How to … Study Sensitive Topics.

Health professions education inevitably exposes learners to socially, emotionally, and ethically sensitive experiences-ranging from academic struggle and mistreatment to emotionally charged clinical encounters. These moments, often occurring in hierarchical and high-pressure clinical settings, can profoundly shape learners' professional identities and well-being. As educators strive to create more humane learning environments, it becomes essential to critically examine how such sensitive topics are navigated, studied, and represented in research.

Returning to Surgical Residency After Maternity Leave: Exploring Challenges and Shining a Light on the Motherhood Advantage.

Objective: Surgeon and surgical resident mothers continue to face discrimination and inequities related to motherhood. Current literature reports on the logistical challenges and some of the negative perceptions faced by these individuals, but we do not know the whole story of how women navigate these challenges. With increasing attention to EDI, understanding women's experiences is crucial for transforming surgical culture.

Sliding Doors: Pivotal Research Decisions and Their Influence on Exploring Sensitive Topics.

This paper is the third in a series that qualitatively explores sensitive topics in health professions education (HPE). Here, our purpose is to consider how researchers' topical, methodological, and theoretical design choices create myriad up and downstream effects impacting study processes, outcomes, and - ultimately - implications for practice. Specifically, this paper uses the Sliding Doors metaphor as a thought exercise to consider alternate research paths for Geringer and colleagues' exploration of the imposter phenomenon (Paper 2), contemplating the what ifs had authors used a different methodology, incorporated other theoretical lenses, or chose to focus their exploration of self-assessment from an entirely different vantage point.

Introducing the intruder paradox: "It's not the imposter syndrome, it's you don't want me in the field".

Introduction: Imposter phenomenon (IP) or syndrome is typically framed as a personal problem rooted in low self-esteem or anxiety that an individual must overcome to succeed. Critics argue that this framing overlooks external forces, such as discrimination, that engender feelings of inadequacy. Since women in medicine disproportionately experience both IP and workplace harms, our purpose was to examine the link between gender-based discrimination and IP from their point of view.

Exploring the perspectives of new-in-practice specialists about the Health Advocate role: "I didn't even know where to start".

Introduction: Current approaches to health advocate (HA) training leave many physicians feeling ill-equipped to advocate effectively. Likewise, faculty perceive the HA role as challenging to teach, role model, evaluate and assess. Progress on improving HA training is further stalled by debate over the role's importance and whether it should be considered intrinsic to medical practice.

From understanding to embracing: A guide on emotions in medical education research: AMEE Guide No. 184.

Emotions refer to conscious and subjectively experienced mental reactions that are often associated with physiological and behavioral changes. In the context of medical education research, emotions have a pervasive influence on how various types of information are perceived and processed, and therefore, can influence how research is designed, conducted, and implemented. While there is considerable research on how emotions affect learning, there is little guidance for researchers on how to recognize and potentially leverage emotions while conducting and disseminating medical education research.

Stakeholder perceptions and experiences of competency-based training with entrustable professional activities (SPECTRE): protocol of a systematic review and thematic synthesis of qualitative research.

Background: Competency-Based Medical Education (CBME) aims to align educational outcomes with the demands of modern healthcare. Entrustable Professional Activities (EPAs) serve as key tools for feedback and professional development within CBME. With the growing body of literature on EPAs, there is a need to synthesize existing research on stakeholders' experiences and perceptions to enhance understanding of the implementation and impact of EPAs.

Qualitative Exploration of the #MeTooMedicine Online Discourse: "Holding Beacons of Light to Shine in the Corners They Are Hoping to Keep Dark".

Purpose: The MeToo movement forced a social reckoning, spurring women in medicine to engage in the #MeTooMedicine online discourse. Given the risks of reporting sexual violence, discrimination, or harassment, it is important to understand how women in medicine use platforms like Twitter to publicly discuss their experiences. With such knowledge, the profession can use the public documentation of women in medicine for transformative change.

The courage to advocate: How two professions approach public advocacy work.

Background: While health advocacy is an established physician role, most of the educational attention to advocacy has been at the individual patient level. Public advocacy-efforts to effect change at the level of communities, populations or society-remains a poorly defined concept whose educational foundation is underdeveloped. To enrich our understanding of public advocacy, we explored how professionals in two disciplines-medicine and law-have approached its tasks and experienced its challenges.

Illness presenteeism among physicians and trainees: Study protocol of a scoping review.

Background: Illness presenteeism (IP) is the phenomenon where individuals continue to work despite illness. While it has been a prevalent and longstanding issue in medicine, the recent onset of the COVID-19 pandemic and the growing movement to improve physician wellness brings renewed interest in this topic. However, there have been no comprehensive reviews on the state of literature of this topic.

A narrative inquiry into non-Indigenous medical educators and leaders participation in reconciliatory work.

Introduction: Globally, medical schools are operationalising policies and programming to address Indigenous health inequities. Although progress has been made, challenges persist. In Canada, where this research is conducted, Indigenous representation within medical schools remains low, leaving a small number of Indigenous advocates leading unprecedented levels of equity-related work, often with insufficient resources.

Only as Strong as the Weakest Link: Resident Perspectives on Entrustable Professional Activities and Their Impact on Learning.

Core to competency-based medical education (CBME) is the use of frequent low-stakes workplace-based assessments. In the Canadian context, these observations of performance are framed around entrustable professional activities (EPAs). We aimed to explore residents' real-world perspectives of EPAs and their perceived impact on learning, because assessments perceived to be "inauthentic," or not truly reflective of their lived experiences, may interfere with learning.

Medical students on the COVID-19 frontline: a qualitative investigation of experiences of relief, stress, and mental health.

Objective: During the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic, medical students were abruptly removed from clinical rotations and transitioned to virtual learning. This study investigates the impact of this shift on students' wellbeing and preparedness for advanced training.

Methods: Through qualitative research methods, including semi-structured interviews, the experiences of medical students working on the COVID-19 frontline were explored.

When Feedback is Not Perceived as Feedback: Challenges for Regulatory Body-Mandated Peer Review.

Purpose: Safe and competent patient care depends on physicians recognizing and correcting performance deficiencies. Generating effective insight depends on feedback from credible sources. Unfortunately, physicians often have limited access to meaningful guidance.

Set Up to Fail? Barriers Impeding Resident Communication Training in Neonatal Intensive Care Units.

Purpose: Learning to navigate difficult clinical conversations is an essential feature of residency training, yet much of this learning occurs "on the job," often without the formative, multisource feedback trainees need. To generate insight into how on-the-job training influences trainee performance, the perspectives of parents and health care providers (HCPs) who engaged in or observed difficult conversations with Neonatal Intensive Care Unit (NICU) trainees were explored.

Method: The iterative data generation and analysis process was informed by constructivist grounded theory.

Having a Bad Day Is Not an Option: Learner Perspectives on Learner Handover.

Purpose: Learner handover is the sharing of learner-related information between supervisors involved in their education. The practice allows learners to build upon previous assessments and can support the growth-oriented focus of competency-based medical education. However, learner handover also carries the risk of biasing future assessments and breaching learner confidentiality.

Grappling with key questions about assessment of the Health Advocate role.

Introduction: Although the CanMEDS framework sets the standard for Canadian training, health advocacy competence does not appear to factor heavily into high stakes assessment decisions. Without forces motivating uptake, there is little movement by educational programs to integrate robust advocacy teaching and assessment practices. However, by adopting CanMEDS, the Canadian medical education community endorses that advocacy is required for competent medical practice.

"Walking on eggshells": experiences of underrepresented women in medical training.

Introduction: Medicine remains an inequitable profession for women. Challenges are compounded for underrepresented women in medicine (UWiM), yet the complex features of underrepresentation and how they influence women's career paths remain underexplored. This qualitative study examined the experiences of trainees self-identifying as UWiM, including how navigating underrepresentation influenced their envisioned career paths.

Combining adaptive expertise and (critically) reflective practice to support the development of knowledge, skill, and society.

Adaptive expertise (AE) and reflective practice (RP), two influential and resonant theories of professional expertise and practice in their own right, may further benefit health professions education if carefully combined. The current societal and systemic context is primed for both AE and RP. Both bodies of work position practitioners as agentive, learning continually and thoughtfully throughout their careers, particularly in order to manage unprecedented situations well.

Expanding the advocacy lens: using photo-elicitation to capture patients' and physicians' perspectives about health advocacy.

Heath advocacy (HA) remains a difficult competency to train and assess, in part because practicing physicians and learners carry uncertainty about what HA means and we are missing patients' perspectives about the role HA plays in their care. Visual methods are useful tools for exploring nebulous topics in health professions education; using these participatory approaches with physicians and patients might counteract the identified training challenges around HA and more importantly, remedy the exclusion of patient perspectives. In this paper we share the verbal and visual reflections of patients and physicians regarding their conceptualizations of, and engagement in 'everyday' advocacy.

Can I Ask a Question About URiM Awards That I Don't Know the Answer to? Designing an Award for Underrepresented Medical Education Researchers.

Meaningful Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion (EDI) efforts may be stymied by concerns about whether proposed initiatives are performative or tokenistic. The purpose of this project was to analyze discussions by the Research in Medical Education (RIME) Program Planning committee about how best to recognize and support underrepresented in medicine (URiM) researchers in medical education to generate lessons learned that might inform local, national, and international actions to implement meaningful EDI initiatives. Ten RIME Program Planning Committee members and administrative staff participated in a focus group held virtually in August 2021.