Search

Objective: Bullying is common in medical specialist training in Australia. To understand bullying rates across medical specialist training programs, we analyse the recent Medical Training Survey, administered by the Medical Board of Australia to all registered medical practitioners., Methods: Medical Training Survey data were extracted and averaged from 2020 to 2023., Results: Many speciality trainees reported personally experiencing or witnessing bullying. This was lowest in general practice (13% personally experienced and 15% witnessed) and highest in obstetrics and gynaecology (27% and 41%). The highest rate of bullying by supervisors was in surgery: 60% of surgical trainees stated that when they were bullied it was by their supervisor. Within psychiatry, 22% of trainees had personally experienced bullying and 32% of trainees had witnessed bullying. When they were bullied, the perpetrator was less commonly a supervisor (40%). In all specialities, there was a very low percentage of bullying which was reported, and was identified as having a satisfactory outcome: the most satisfactory outcomes (13%) were in general practice., Conclusion: Current rates of bullying for medical specialist trainees, the reluctance to report, as well as the lack of satisfactory outcomes, is of grave concern for Australian healthcare. This requires urgent attention at a systems level., Competing Interests: DisclosureThe author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Objective: We present reflections on student evaluation of teaching (SET) in the context of recent higher educational research that assesses SET, as well as concurrent and/or subsequent student performance., Conclusions: In a sense, there is in-built cynicism in SET, with more favourable SET for easier assessment. There is emerging evidence that SET is inversely proportional to the performance of students in subsequent courses, i.e. the higher the ratings, the poorer the students perform in subsequent studies. It is proposed that SET should be combined with contemporaneous formative and summative assessments of student performance in medical school settings, especially in psychiatry education.

Objectives:: We explore the relative roles of student evaluation of teaching (SET) and teachers' assessment of student performance (ASP) in medical school education in psychiatry., Conclusions:: We conclude that SET and ASP need to be better researched as outcome measures, and input from both processes needs to be balanced in evaluating psychiatric medical education.