Applying Lean Thinking: The Assessment of Professional Conduct of Medical Students

Methods of incorporating the evaluation of professional conduct have varied widely by specialty, institution, and level of training. Medical educators now are tasked with developing more operationally-defined evaluative tools while balancing the ongoing need to reduce administrative load and survey fatigue that have been linked with physician burnout. Our aim was to investigate the value of a single question to measure the professional conduct of a medical student. Responses to the single question, “please rate this student’s potential as a resident on YOUR team”, were correlated with the individual core competency domains (17 questions with six questions targeted towards professional conduct), overall clinical evaluation score, final grade, and shelf examination score. Resident and faculty ratings across the 17 questions, overall clinical evaluation scores, and final grades were significantly associated with ratings on the single “Housestaff Potential” question. While this score was also significantly associated with the shelf score for resident evaluators only, it was a significant unique predictor for the overall clinical evaluation score for both evaluators. Our findings suggest that a single question designed to rate the professional conduct of medical students can be efficiently incorporated into the clerkship clinical evaluation.