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Incivility in medical education: A scoping review

Laura Abate* and Larrie Greenberg


*Correspondence: Laura Abate leabate@gwu.edu School of Medicine & Health Sciences, The George Washington University, 2300 Eye St NW, Washington, DC 20037, USA


Acknowledgements: Not applicable 


Authors' contributions: Both authors contributed to selection of articles, data extraction, and preparation of the manuscript. LEA developed the search strategies and LG drafted the discussion. All authors read and approved the fnal manuscript.


Funding: The authors did not receive funding for this article. Availability of data and materials PubMed search strategy and articles that met inclusion criteria are included in this manuscript. 


Declarations Ethics approval and consent to participate: Not applicable 


Consent for publication: Not applicable 


Competing interests: The authors declare that they have no competing interests.

Abstract

Incivility in the workplace, school and political system in the United States has permeated mass and social media in recent years and has also been recognized as a detrimental factor in medical education. In this scoping review, we use the term incivility to encompass a spectrum of behaviors that occur across the continuum of medical education, and which include verbal abuse including rude or dismissive conduct, sexual and racial harassment and discrimination, and sexual and physical assault. We identifed research on incivility involving medical students, residents and fellows, and faculty in North America to describe multiple aspects of incivility in medical education settings published since 2000. Our results reinforce that incivility is likely under-reported across the continuum of medical education and also confrmed incidences of incivility involving nursing personnel and patients, not emphasized in previous reviews. The authors suggest a zero-tolerance national policy if this problem is to be resolved.

Keywords: Incivility, Bullying, Harassment, Abuse, Discrimination, Medical education, Medical school, Residency, Residents, Faculty

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