Shedding light into the black box: A prospective longitudinal study identifying the CanMEDS roles of final year medical students’ on-ward activities

AbstractIntroduction: To our best knowledge, a rigorous prospective analysis of final year medical students’ (FY medical students) activity profiles during workplace learning is lacking. The present study investigated the CanMEDS characteristics of all on-ward activities performed by internal medicine FY medical students. We tested the hypotheses that during FY medical student workplace training (I) routine activities are predominantly performed, while supervised, more complex activities are underrepresented with (II) FY medical students performing an insufficient number of autonomous activities and that (III) the CanMEDS roles of the Communicator and the Professional prevail.Methods: During the second and the sixth week of their final year trimester at the University of Heidelberg Medical Hospital, N = 34 FY medical students (73% female; mean age 26.4 ± 2.4) were asked to keep a detailed record of all their on-ward activities and to document the duration, mode of action (active versus passive; independen...