Abstract
Clinical clerkships allow students to transition from exclusively academic to real professional settings. This stressful transition can lead to burnout. Recent awareness has led to the creation of mentorship programs focused on improving students' well-being. A mentorship program was developed for students in the clinical clerkships to monitor and foster habits for well-being based on a six-pillar model: mental, social, emotional, academic, nutritional, and physical health. The purpose of the chapter is to present the model and preliminary results of a study that assessed the program's effects through the mentor's perception. A qualitative approach with semi-structured interviews was used. Results indicate impact on mental (85%) and emotional health (85%), as evidenced by the identification of multiple red-flag cases. The implementation of programs must effectively foster students' self-assessment and allows them to develop better coping mechanisms.
TopIntroduction
Medical education has been in constant evolution throughout history. Since the Flexner report (1910) in the early twentieth century, a study of more than 150 medical schools in the United States and Canada, several transition phases in the teaching and learning processes have been identified which require teachers to assume new roles and skills as medical educators (Olivares and Valdez, 2017). Olivares and Valdez recognized four historical stages in medical education: Science Based Learning, Problem Based Learning, Competency Based Learning, and Perspective Based Learning. The major transitions had a focus on developing a student reasoning profile and a corresponding faculty profile. It is presented in table 1.
Table 1. Historical stages in medical education of Olivares and Valdez (2017)
| Historical Stage | Student Reasoning Profile | Required Faculty Profile |
| Science Based Learning | Students work to develop deductive reasoning. | Faculty know as a lecturer. |
| Problem Based Learning | Students gather information, infer, and use inductive reasoning to find a solution. | Faculty that works as a facilitator, work as tutors during the sessions were students work. |
| Competency Based Learning | Students practice a skill until they are able to demonstrate mastery of it. | Faculty participate as an assessor for students competency. |
| Perspective Based Learning | Students develop transformative reasoning to question traditions and paradigms, to make co-built solutions with the community that is sustainable for the environment. | Faculty act as a mentor for students to solve challenges. |
Medical education is designed for students to gain skills and independence until, gradually, they can be responsible for the patient’s health and well-being. Although ideally, training should provide sufficient practice opportunities for all students, this is time and resource constricted (López and Valdez-García, 2019). Learning in the clinical setting is highly inñuenced by several trends on care, such as the decrease of patients, the impact of cost optimization, and a tendency on reducing the number of in-hospital hours by the implementation of patient-safety procedures. Programs, faculty, and universities should adapt and reorient their efforts to continue preparing physicians that would revolutionize patient care.
Key Terms in this Chapter
Well-Being: Is the state of being that integrates healthy lifestyle, self-awareness and fullness of living in an individual.
Mental Health: Is the state of peace where an individual finds inner balance between the problematical situations that challenge daily life, and the coping mechanisms to overcome them.
Physical Health: It refers to caring for one’s body to stay healthy. Physical activity is consistently related to higher levels of self-esteem and self-concept and lower levels of anxiety and stress.
Mentorship: Is a reciprocal trust relationship between an experienced individual with a mentee, fostering adequate personal and professional development in which the young colleague gains experience through the professional life of the mentor.
Nutritional Health: It refers to maintaining a balanced diet in order to bind every other pillar together by providing one’s body with adequate-quality nutrition.
Clinical Clerkship: Is the last stage in training that a medical student has to become a primary care practitioner. During this period, students rotate through different specialty and hospital settings, allowing them to be active participants in patient care, under the supervision of medical specialists.
Social Health: Refers to nourishing healthy and harmonious relationships with the people around an individual and contributing to the growth of the community to which he belongs.
Academic Pillar: It encompasses the performance of the student in his or her educational endeavors. It could also integrate the long-career goal planning.
Emotional Health: Is understanding and embracing the individual emotions and feelings, acknowledging and validating the feelings of others, and regulating them in a respectful understanding.