Lessons learned from the David Geffen school of medicine-UCLA clinical clerkship psychology of bias seminar.

Despite the documented benefits of a diverse physician workforce, significant barriers continue to limit some students' success within the clinical clerkship phase of their medical education. These students may experience unintended bias in grading and assessment that can limit their access to future opportunities. Anti-bias training is one strategy used to address these shortcomings in the assessment process. However, anti-bias training has been shown to be ineffective, resented by participants, and can even result in the opposite of its intended effects. Innovative training strategies to support equitable student success are therefore critical. Here we present the lessons learned from implementing a pilot medical education training program for clerkship directors to avoid these issues. To reduce unintended assessment bias students face during their clinical clerkships, a fall seminar for clerkship directors was designed and implemented at the UCLA David Geffen School of Medicine (DGSOM). These directors participated in ten monthly Zoom sessions and one culminating four-hour in-person seminar on the UCLA campus in August 2024. Psychological topics related to bias, such as intergroup dynamics, ingroup favoritism, and social dominance theory, were openly discussed with and among the faculty. To enable continuous improvement, a pre-, mid-year, and post-evaluation was administered to participants to capture participants' perceptions of the effectiveness of the training, materials, and the program. Mid-year evaluations found the Zoom sessions ineffective at increasing participants' understanding of anti-bias constructs and led to negative perceptions and resistance to the training. The transition to an in-person seminar was made accordingly. The seminar yielded much higher satisfaction, negligible resistance, and much higher perceived comprehension rates than the online format. The clerkship directors' post-seminar evaluations greatly increased across all measures. It appears that having a social psychologist co-lead an in-person seminar with a leading DGSOM physician, along with other changes, was critical to the success of the in-person seminar.