At the recent AAMC meeting on how to integrate quality into teaching hospitals, the question that kept popping up from speaker after speaker was how to address the fact that doctors in teaching hospitals don’t get along.

Unfortunately, all the specialty bashing that takes place prevents the adoption of a team based culture necessary to advance quality and safety.  As one speaker highlighted, how can we really start to address this topic when specialty services are busy blocking the consult or disparaging the internal medicine doctor by calling them a ‘flea.’

I hadn’t heard the term ‘flea’ in awhile but many onlookers were nodding in agreement, possibly thinking about the last time they heard someone disparaging the ER for an incomplete workup or a specialist blocking the consult as ‘inappropriate.’  The discussion about quality and safety morphed into every medical educator’s favorite topic, ‘professionalism.’

Ironically, while medical educators love discussing professionalism, this word has become despised by medical students.  It has been the subject of the last 2 years of senior class shows at Pritzker.  Why?  Because in response to numerous calls by the AAMC and other groups including the public, Pritzker, like many other schools, have launched a professionalism initiative designed to promote professionalism.

As you can guess, any efforts to ‘teach professionalism’ to students seem preachy and insincere.  So, what’s a medical educator to do?

After years of contemplating this problem with colleagues and experts, we concluded that we first need to identify and reward faculty role models and ensure that our faculty and residents emulate the behaviors that we wish to see in our students.  Apparently, we aren’t alone.

The American Board of Internal Medicine Foundation has awarded 6 grants to variety of organizations to promote professionalism among physicians in practice.  We are fortunate to have received funding through this mechanism to actually address the topic at hand — specialty bashing in teaching hospitals — particularly between hospitalists, primary care physicians, and emergency medicine doctors.

Interestingly, this problem is more prevalent in teaching hospitals.  When our residents rotate at a nearby community hospital, they often comment on how nice the doctors are to each other, even thanking them for consultations.  Of course, unlike the attendings in teaching hospitals on fixed salary, physicians in the community hospital actually make more money for each consultation.  So, aligning financial incentives can actually promote professionalism.

I was at this meeting with one of our 2^nd year medical students who earned rave reviews for his presentation on student efforts in teaching quality and safety at Pritzker (while I may be biased, you can see his presentation for yourself.) On the way home, we noted that although professionalism is a dirty word among our students, but that medical educators continue to perseverate on it even at a meeting about quality and safety.  We need a better word and a better way to address these issues.  Because most students are professional, it’s the actions of a few that are remembered by faculty and attributed to all students and their generation.

On a side note, Marcus also asked me why medicine doctors are called ‘fleas’ since he had not heard that term…yet.   I did not know the answer but here are some potential origins I found – the most useful of sources being StudentDoctor.net.

• Internists can be spotted with a stethoscope around their neck, or a ‘flea’ collar
• Internists, like fleas, are the last things to leave a dying body
• They travel in packs on rounds
• Doctors were very devoted to their plague patients, similar to fleas that were responsible for spreading the deadly disease.

While I don’t know the exact reason, it’s interesting that while 3 of the reasons are clearly derogatory, one explanation of ‘fleas’ actually highlights ‘professionalism.’ Ironically, maybe all we have to do to get doctors to stop using this term is to say that it’s part of that dirty p word ‘professionalism.’

Vineet Arora is an internal medicine physician who blogs at FutureDocs.

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