Using Reflective Practice to Enhance Student Professionalism

Reflective practice, critically reflecting on one's actions or attitudes to engage in the process of continuous adaptation and learning, has proven to be an effective strategy for improved patient care. Additionally, literature supports applying reflective practice for professional growth in medical providers. When contemplating professionalism training in physician assistant (PA) education, it is important to consider how to obtain buy-in from students. One way to do this is to link professionalism to the students' future career as a PA. The School of Physician Assistant Studies at Pacific University (the Program) created an Online Orientation Reflective Practice Assignment that was implemented during online orientation. Students were prompted to use reflective practice to create detailed "plans for success." The goal of this assignment was to reduce common professionalism missteps students often experienced. Data regarding the number of professionalism encounters per cohort, broken down into occurrences by curricular phase (didactic vs clinical), was tracked and collated using Microsoft (R) Excel (R). The data was analyzed to determine trends. Implementation of the Online Reflective Practice Assignment for all PA students at the beginning of their education has increased student awareness of the Program's, and the profession's, expectations regarding professionalism and accountability. Thus far, the resulting number of professionalism missteps have not decreased year-over-year. We hypothesize that this is due to the difficulty meeting increased administrative expectations and burdens put on students during the pandemic. Students' use of reflective practice to review what went wrong and to create plans to avoid missteps in the future allows them to focus on productive next steps in building their professional identity. Implementation of the Online Orientation Reflective Practice Assignment has better prepared students for the expectations of the PA profession and provided them with a solid foundation to build their professional identity throughout their education and into their careers.