Learning by scar formation

I firmly believe that if we want our doctors to develop a good professional attitude we have to provide them with the kind of learning environment which encourages them to develop such an attitude. Students must see that it is possible to educate people in a supportive environment. I do not know whether such an environment would teach students good attitudes, but I am convinced that a bad learning environment will lead to a decline of students' attitudes. This conviction is substantiated by the paper by Woloschuk et al.11

A supportive environment is even more important in assessment. Medical educators may disagree as to whether it is possible to combine formative and summative functions in the same assessment, but most do agree that a necessary prerequisite for such a combination is a safe learning environment – or at least an environment in which students would not hesitate to show their weaker areas.

The good news is that with this knowledge we can increase the quality of our preclinical and clinical education, and ameliorate the value of our summative and formative assessment quite easily by trying to provide a safe and relatively stress‐free environment. This should then prove to be a cheap, achievable and low‐tech approach with high benefits.