Greg Malin

University of Saskatchewan | U of S · Department of Family Medicine

Theory: Impostor phenomenon (IP) refers to people's feelings of intellectual fraudulence and fear of being "discovered," despite contradicting evidence of success. Due to its association with burnout and distress, it is progressively being studied in medicine. While various explanations for IP have been discussed in the literature, the role of moti...

Theory: Medical programs have turned to mindfulness-based initiatives to help reduce student distress and promote healthy coping within the learning environment. However, little attention has been paid to how fulfillment of medical students’ basic psychological needs (autonomy, competence, and relatedness) impacts their capacity to be mindful and c...

Introduction: Mentorship programs are ubiquitous in medical education. However, few emphasize equal development for learners and mentors, or incorporate clinical skills, which may be important for promoting medical students’ self-determination. Central to this consideration are the three basic psychological needs for autonomy, competence, and relat...

Background Medical training can be highly stressful for students and negatively impact their mental health. Important to this matter are the types of coping strategies (and their antecedents) medical students use, which are only characterized to a limited extent. A better understanding of these phenomena can shed additional light on ways to support...

Purpose: Medical student distress is an increasing concern in medical education. Addressing this issue requires a comprehensive understanding of what factors influence learners' stress in medical school. Grounded in Self-Determination Theory (SDT), this study explores the relative association between medical students' mindfulness, resilience, basi...

Implication Statement We created a near-peer mentoring program in pre-clerkship, which gave medical students the opportunity to work together, teach others, and practice their clinical skills. It uniquely connects first year “learner-mentees” and second year “instructor-mentors” in semi-structured learning environments, from October to April. Bey...

Background: Self-determination theory (SDT) represents an organismic theory of motivation and well-being, viewing people as naturally evolving creatures with innate needs for growth, mastery, and connection. According to SDT, for these tendencies to function optimally and for people to flourish, they require support of three basic psychological nee...

Purpose: Medical student well-being is an increasing concern in medical education. Understanding the role instructors and programs have in supporting well-being is an important puzzle piece. This study explores the relationship between medical students’ perceptions of instructor autonomy-support, motivation, and well-being. Using self-determination...

We created a clinical ultrasound (CUS) elective in clerkship, which gave medical students the opportunity to enhance their knowledge and technical skills while refining their CUS-related clinical decision making. This elective uniquely allowed medical students to integrate their CUS knowledge and skills into real patient care within the clinical en...

Context: Medical schools of geographically large nations have expanded into rural areas to facilitate the development of a sustainable rural pipeline of physicians. Preceptor, or clinical teacher, recruitment at these sites has been an ongoing challenge. However, residents-as-teachers (RaT) curricula have not been modified to support the developme...

Background: There is increasing acknowledgment that medical training is stressful for students and can impact their well-being. An important aspect of this is self-determination and basic psychological need satisfaction. A better understanding of how medical student perceptions of the learning environment impacts their basic psychological needs fo...

Purpose: Triple C is the Canadian competency-based medical education (CBME) initiative for family medicine. The authors report on a study exploring the impacts Triple C has had across Canada. Method: A multi-institutional team conducted a realist study to explore the current view of the impact Triple C implementation had in different programs ac...

Backround: Our medical school struggled to create a less cumbersome, fair and flexible promotion policy that tracks student performance over time while clearly distinguishing the cut-point between remediation and failure. Summary: We created a promotion policy in our “Foundations of Clinical Medicine” course termed the “Grade Deficit Point (GDP)...

Background/Purpose: 20% of University of Saskatchewan’s UGME pre-clerkship weekly schedule is independent-learning time (ILT). The purpose of this study was to determine: 1) how students utilized ILT, 2) perceived ILT needs, and 3) if self-study skill (SSS) mentoring occurred. Methods: Year 1 (N=87) and Year 2 (N=62) students completed an online su...

Background/Purpose Self-Determination theory (SDT) proposes that fulfillment of three innate psychological needs – autonomy, competence, and relatedness – are the source of individual self-motivation and personal growth. Empirically derived, SDT is an extensively researched motivational theory. Its application in medical education is limited. Addit...

Introduction While medical schools strive to foster students’ lifelong learning, motivational theories have not played an explicit role in curricular design. Self-determination Theory is a prominent motivational theory. It posits that perceived autonomy, competence and relatedness foster intrinsic motivation. This study explores the effects of auto...

Medical students enter medical school with varied backgrounds and learning expectations. Tensions arise between medical students’ expectations and expectations of the teachers and program, which impacts motivation. In self-determination theory people are motivated by satisfaction of three psychological needs: autonomy, competence, and relatedness,...

We have found it very challenging to integrate images from our radiology digital imaging repository into the curriculum of our local medical school. Thus, it has been difficult to convey important knowledge related to viewing and interpreting diagnostic radiology images. We sought to determine if we could create a solution for this problem and eval...

Radiology teaching file systems have the potential to enhance medical school programs by giving students access to high-quality images showing normal anatomy and common pathologies. However, most teaching file systems are primarily designed for residents and clinicians, so it is unclear how case content, including images and supporting text and att...