https://www.nationalreview.com/2022/07/wokeism-is-corrupting-medical-education-and-endangering-patients/
There are so many unintended consequences of relying on Progressive policies. Knowledge of what is occurring in medical schools could actually drive normally unbiased people to suspect an otherwise competent physician is incompetent simply because they are the products of lowered standards at medical schools and residency programs.Quote:
This month, medical-school graduates will begin their postgraduate training positions and residencies nationwide. They'll primarily work at teaching hospitals, which are charged with ensuring that these future physicians uphold the highest standards of patient care. Yet woke ideology is undermining this essential part of medical education in two ways. First, admissions and testing standards are being lowered in the name of diversity and equity. Second, victimization culture is making it harder to give low-performing and unqualified residents the feedback they need to avoid endangering patients.
This decline is being driven by trends in medical school, where activists have pressured administrators to drop strict testing standards on the grounds that testing is racist. At least 40 institutions and counting have given in, dropping MCAT requirements mainly for those who are "underrepresented in medicine."
The lowering of standards on the front end of medical school is now matched by less grading at the back end. This year, the United States Medical Licensing Exam's first section, which residency programs have typically relied on to select candidates, has replaced objective grades with a pass/fail system. The medical-school deans who approved this seismic shift away from merit explicitly did so to allow more minority students to qualify for competitive residency programs.
Consider a study published in the prominent journal Academic Medicine in May. It asserted that lower scores by minority residents on evaluations of professionalism, medical knowledge, and readiness for independent practice can be ascribed to only three things: bias from supervising physicians, a worse training environment, or racist testing. At no point did the study authors consider a more obvious conclusion: that lower scores reflect genuinely weaker performance, an unsurprising result of years of lowering standards.
An attending physician at a prominent institution recently told my organization that residents now have the power and they're not afraid to use it against the physicians who are supposed to be their supervisors. Physicians rightly worry that administrators will take the residents' side in a dispute: What they know to be a necessary corrective action, the medical diversity-industrial complex could easily see as grounds for termination. So the physicians often stay silent, except with the most egregious mistakes.