Saleem Razack

• MD
• Head of Faculty at McGill University

Medical Professionalism: Theory, Education, and Practice is a comprehensive, four-part look at medical profession in a single resource for learners, educators, independently practicing physicians, and health care administrators. It begins with an examination of the definitions, theoretical underpinnings, and scope of the concept of medical professi...

There is a scarcity of health human resources worldwide. In occupational therapy (OT), physical therapy (PT), and speech-language pathology (S-LP), attrition and retention issues amplify this situation and contribute to the precarity of health systems. Therefore, we aimed to investigate retention strategies for rehabilitation professionals in Quebe...

Over the last decade, there has been a drive to emphasize professional identity formation in medical education. This shift has had important and positive implications for the education of physicians. However, the increasing recognition of longstanding structural inequalities within society and the profession has highlighted how conceptualizations o...

BACKGROUND: Health human resources are scarce worldwide. In occupational therapy (OT), physical therapy (PT), and speech-language pathology (S-LP), attrition and retention issues amplify this situation and contribute to the precarity of health systems. OBJECTIVE: To investigate the phenomena of attrition and retention with OTs, PTs and S-LPs who st...

Purpose: The inclusion of quality improvement (QI) and patient safety (PS) into CanMEDS reflects an expectation that graduating physicians are competent in these areas upon training completion. To ensure that Canadian postgraduate specialty training achieves this, the translation of QI/PS competencies into training standards as part of the impleme...

This scoping review will address a critical knowledge-practice gap by synthesizing the existing literature reporting on the implementation of educational approaches in and by building on current strengths to advance curriculum development and implementation.

Issue: Asians have experienced a rise in racialized hate crimes due to the anti-Asian rhetoric that has accompanied the COVID-19 pandemic. However, there has been little acknowledgement of anti-Asian discrimination within the medical education community. While anti-Asian hate is not new or unfamiliar to us, four authors of Asian descent, it has gi...

Academic medicine institutions have historically employed policies as a means to tackle various types of discrimination and harassment within educational and professional settings, thereby affirming their dedication to promoting diversity, equity, and inclusion. However, the implementation and effectiveness of policies are constrained by limitation...

Introduction Hospital safety monitoring systems are foundational to how adverse events are identified and addressed. They are well positioned to bring equity-related safety issues to the forefront for action. However, there is uncertainty about how they have been, and can be, used to achieve this goal. We will undertake a critical interpretive synt...

Introduction: Attrition is defined as a permanent departure from one's profession or the workforce. Existing literature on retention strategies, contributing factors to the attrition of rehabilitation professionals and how different environments influence professionals' decision-making to stay in/leave their profession, is limited in scope and spe...

Health professions education is a socialisation process into a privileged collectivity with a common goal of members who are competent. This chapter provides some frameworks through which research questions related to equity in health professions education can be done rigorously and with attention to the researchers' own social positioning as the r...

Introduction Advances in medical technology and postoperative care have led to increased survival of children with medical complexity (CMC). Parents of CMC develop substantial caregiver expertise and familiarity with paediatric intensive care unit (PICU) staff and treatment procedures which may give rise to tensions regarding respective roles, care...

The importance of advancing equity, diversity, and inclusion for all members of the academic medical community has gained recent attention. Academic medical organizations have attempted to increase broader representation while seeking structural reforms consistent with the goal of enhancing equity and reducing disproportionality. However, efforts r...

Objectives: To describe the reasoning processes used by pediatric intensivists to make antibiotic-related decisions. Design: Grounded theory qualitative study. Setting: Three Canadian university-affiliated tertiary medical, surgical, and cardiac PICUs. Patients: Twenty-one PICU physicians. Interventions: None. Measurements and main result...

To address the underrepresentation of Black students in medical schools in Canada and identify barriers in selection processes, we compare data from the latest Canadian census to that of an exit-survey conducted after a situational judgment test (Casper) among medical school applicants and from questionnaires done after selection interviews in Queb...

In the latest instalment of “When I Say…” Cleland and Razack argue it is time for medical education to acknowledge its complicit participation in socially constructed privilege and systemic inequalities and commit to change.

Implication Statement The Community Health and Social Medicine (CHASM) Incubator is a social impact venture that gives medical and other health care students the opportunity to develop initiatives that sustainably promote health equity for, and in partnership with, community partners and historically marginalized communities. Students learn how to...

In this article the authors review the current-day definition of professionalism through the lens of the two ongoing pandemics: COVID-19 and racism. The pandemics have led to contemporary practice-related questions, such as: does professionalism entail that health care providers (HCP) be compelled to treat patients without PPE or if patients refuse...

A few years ago, at an international conference paper session on student selection, I committed a fatal cross‐cultural misunderstanding, which was only corrected some years later. The presenter, from the UK, was talking about widening access programs to medicine for “high‐school leavers” versus “university graduates”. I thought to myself how activi...

AIMS & OBJECTIVES: Moral distress (MD) is a concern for all practitioners in the pediatric intensive care unit(PICU). Though MD is well-described in the literature, interventions to address it remain under-studied. Our primary goal was to evaluate the impact of a novel implementation of Schwartz Center Rounds (SCR), a reoccurring multidisciplinary...

Background: We examine the cultural myth of the medical meritocracy, whereby the "best and the brightest" are admitted and promoted within the profession. We explore how this narrative guides medical practice in ways that may no longer be adequate in the contexts of practice today. Methods: Narrative analysis of medical students' and physicians'...

Learning in a clinical context is foundational in the training of health professionals; there is simply no alternative. The subject of the clinical learning environment (CLE) is at the forefront of discussions. In this introduction to a themed issue on the CLE, we present an expanded conceptual model that approaches the CLE through six different le...

Aim: While diversity, equity, and inclusion are much proclaimed aspirational goals in education programs, the clinical learning environment (CLE) frequently falls short of meaningful incorporation of these concepts in processes, policies, and local culture. In this paper, we explore how inclusion, diversity, and equity can and should be defined and...

Objectives: To evaluate in-situ simulation to prepare a PICU to move to a new, redesigned unit. Methods: The study setting is an academic PICU. This is a cross-sectional study using in-situ simulations of common PICU admissions. Postsimulation, participants completed a survey comparing the perception of preparedness pre- and postsimulation (via...

Background: Social distance between patients and physicians has been shown to affect the quality of care that patients receive. Little is known about how social distance between students and patients is experienced by learners during early clinical exposures in medical school. Objective: This study aims to explore students’ stories of experiencing...

FULL TEXT URL: http://rdcu.be/ogQY ----- Interprofessional education (IPE) has been widely incorporated into health professional curricula and accreditation standards despite an arguably thin base of evidence regarding its clinical effects, theoretical underpinnings, and social implications. To better understand how and why IPE first took root, but...

In this personal essay, the author reflects on experiences in global health professions education projects, and the moral reasoning that might be required to define explicitly what constitutes ethical participation. Three interrelated notions are explored: The decision to engage or not through a discussion of the concepts of safety, understanding p...

Learning the societal roles and responsibilities of the physician may involve difficult, contentious conversations about topics such as race, gender, sexual orientation, and class, as well as violence, inequities, sexual assault, and child abuse. If not done well, these discussions may be deeply traumatizing to learners for whom these subjects "cut...

An interdisciplinary faculty development workshop on cultural competency (CC) was implemented and evaluated for the Faculty of Medicine at McGill University. It consisted of a 4-hour workshop and 2 follow-up sessions. A reflective practice framework was used. The project was evaluated using the Multicultural Assessment Questionnaire (MAQ), evaluati...

Multiple-Mini Interviews (MMIs) were used to assess professional attributes of candidates seeking admission to an occupational therapy professional entry-level master's program. Candidates and interviewers were invited to complete a questionnaire comprised of quantitative and open-ended questions following the MMIs. The MMIs were perceived to be fa...

ContextCalls to increase medical class representativeness to better reflect the diversity of society represent a growing international trend. There is an inherent tension between these calls and competitive student selection processes driven by academic achievement. How is this tension manifested?Methods Our three-phase interdisciplinary research p...

To evaluate the acceptability and reliability of the Multiple Mini Interview (MMI) for the selection of applicants to an Otolaryngology-Head and Neck (OTL-HNS) residency program. Prospective observational study. Canadian medical graduates applying to the OTL-HNS residency program at McGill University in 2011 and 2012 underwent a 7-station MMI. Upon...

To assess the impact of a written cognitive aid on expressed clinical reasoning and quantity and the accuracy of information transfer during resident doctor handover. This study was a randomised controlled trial in an academic paediatric intensive care unit (PICU) of 20 handover events (10 events per group) from residents in their first PICU rotati...

Calls to increase the demographic representativeness of medical classes to better reflect the diversity of society are part of a growing international trend. Despite this, entry into medical school remains highly competitive and exclusive of marginalized groups. To address these questions, we conducted a Foucauldian discourse analysis of 15 publica...

Purpose: Policy groups recommend monitoring and supporting more diversity among medical students and the medical workforce. In Canada, few data are available regarding the diversity of medical students, which poses challenges for policy development and evaluation. The authors examine diversity through a framework of surface (visible) and deep (les...

Purpose: Medical school Web sites often advance arguments to claim institutional excellence and appeal to the "best and the brightest" who might join their institutions as medical students. What do these texts communicate about institutional excellence, or the excellence of potential applicants to medical school? How are discourses related to soci...

Objective: 1) To determine the reliability of the Multiple Mini Interview (MMI) for resident selection into an otolaryngology-head and neck surgery (OTL-HNS) program. 2) To assess the degree of acceptance by major stakeholders (interviewers and applicants) towards the MMI when compared to traditional interviews. Method: Canadian medical graduates a...

The importance of faculty development to improve clinicians' teaching skills has been well articulated in the literature. There are few objective measures of the impact of faculty development on teaching skills. The objective structured teaching exercise (OSTE) is a faculty development tool that may meet this challenge. It also has great potential...

the diagnostic accuracy of otitis media with effusion (OME) has been shown to be poor among medical students, residents, and practicing physicians. to determine if the use of pneumatic video-otoendoscopic examination (VOE) improves the diagnostic accuracy of OME among residents. pediatric residents were randomized into a "pneumatic" examination gro...

Despite widespread endorsement for administrative training during residency, teaching and learning in this area remains intermittent and limited in most programmes. Aim: To inform the development of a Manager Train-the-Trainer program for faculty, the Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons of Canada undertook a survey of perceived Manager trainin...

To improve the quality of handover of complex patients after pediatric cardiac surgery through the use of a simple handover tool. Prospective, pre-/postinterventional. A tertiary care, pediatric intensive care unit in North America. Thirty-three consenting healthcare providers from pediatric cardiac anesthesia, critical care, and cardiothoracic sur...

The goals of this study were three-fold: to explore the reasons why some clinical teachers regularly attend centralised faculty development activities; to compare their responses with those of colleagues who do not attend, and to learn how we can make faculty development programmes more pertinent to teachers' needs. In 2008-2009, we conducted focus...

The McGill University Faculty of Medicine undertook a pilot, simulation-based multiple mini-interview (MMI) for medical school applicant selection, which ran simultaneously with traditional unstructured interviews (all applicants underwent both processes). This paper examines major stakeholder (applicants and evaluators) opinions towards the MMI co...

An academic journal serves its purpose by being read and understood. International medical education journals that want to reach a wider readership must be accessible to a multitude of cultures and contexts. It is therefore important that authors and editors consider how their use of language will be interpreted by health care education colleagues...

In a previous study, a group of non-clinician medical education experts identified 30 pedagogical principles, knowledge of which might enhance clinical teaching effectiveness. To assess expert teachers? perceptions of which basic pedagogical principles, if known and understood, would enhance their teaching effectiveness. We conducted an on-line Del...

An innovative therapy is a newly introduced or modified therapy with unproven effect or side effect, and is undertaken in the best interest of the patient. The ethical use of innovative therapies has been controversial. In paediatrics, the conflict between withholding potential rescue therapy and protecting a vulnerable population's rights and welf...

Health research is a moral duty because it is the foundation for evidence-based care by all health care practitioners. Specific Canadian policies and regulations govern the conduct of human research; ethics review of research is required before research is conducted. Research in children poses important challenges with regard to informed consent an...

Paediatric residency programs rarely prepare trainees to assume resuscitation team leadership roles despite the recognized need for these skills by specialty accreditation organizations. We conducted a needs-assessment survey of all residents in the McGill Pediatric Residency Program, which demonstrated that most residents had minimal or no experie...

There is increasing recognition of the need for sophistication in the way culture is understood and taught in medicine. A two-phase study designed to understand how best to approach cultural training with pediatric residents was conducted. A needs assessment, consisting of resident and faculty focus groups, was carried out from which a workshop was...

To determine thematic similarities and differences in the implementation of common-content communications skills training (CST) in medicine, surgery, paediatrics, and obstetrics and gynaecology residency programmes. Communications skills training based upon the Kalamazoo consensus statement of communication skills in the clinical encounter was impl...

The aim of this study was to conduct an evaluation of a sedation protocol that transfers some decision-making authority for analgesia and sedation, within clearly defined parameters, to nurses in a pediatric intensive care unit (PICU). The sedation protocol used in this study was appropriate for any age group. The clinical course of 10 patients adm...

OBJECTIVE: The objective of this study was to conduct an item analysis of the COMFORT scale within a sample of critically ill children. The COMFORT scale is a tool that measures eight clinical parameters at the bedside to determine a critically ill child's level of distress. However, documentation of the reliability and validity of specific compone...

This paper discusses our research on two new generation blood substitutes. One is based on the crosslinking of hemoglobin, superoxide dismutase(SOD) and catalase (CAT) to form polyhemoglobin-SOD-CAT. This is being investigated for use in conditions with potential problems related to ischemia-reperfusion injuries as in severe hemorrhagic shock, stro...

Medical residents in training are as much targets of pharmaceutical-industry marketing as are physicians in practice. This interaction is often subtle and takes the form of sponsorship of meals at academic events, support for conference travel, books, and items such as pens and notepads. Most residency programs direct little time towards training i...

An in vivo rat model of isolated intestinal ischemia-perfusion was developed. This is used to compare the effects of crosslinked hemoglobin (PolyHb) versus crosslinked hemolobin-superoxide dismutase-catalase (PolyHb-SOD-CAT) on free radical generation in ischemia-reperfusion. Fasted, anesthetized male Sprague Dawley rats underwent midline laparotom...

A Paper Commissioned as part of the Environmental Scan for the Future of Medical Education in Canada Postgraduate Project 2 This Environmental Scan was commissioned by the Future of Medical Education in Canada Postgraduate (FMEC PG) Project, funded by Health Canada and supported and managed by a consortium comprised of the Association of Faculties...