Risk factors at medical school for subsequent professional misconduct
What were the key findings?
We commissioned a multi-centre case-control study, led by Nottingham University. It set out to explore whether there is a link between proven professional misconduct and a doctor's time at medical school.
This built on an earlier pilot study. It suggested that doctors who went on to have proven professional misconduct had experienced difficulties during their undergraduate training. The team examined enquiries about doctors who had graduated from eight different medical schools. The enquiries were between 1999 and 2004 and controls chosen at random from their graduation cohorts at medical school.
The findings suggest that the following were each predictors of later professional misconduct:
- being male
- coming from a lower socioeconomic background
- failing early course exams.
This suggested that pastoral care should be the target to provide extra support to these students. And to explore attitudinal as well as academic aspects of failure.
These findings should be treated with caution as the study numbers were small. Larger studies are needed before the findings can be applied more widely.
