Browsing by Author "Guraya, Shaista Salman"

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A scoping review of mentorship in Graduate Medical Education: a proposed conceptual framework.
(2025) Abdelmannan, Dima; Buhumaid, Rasha; Salman, Hira; Ba Madhaf, Wail A Abdulrahman Hasan; AlRajaby, Hafidh Mohammad Khamis; Zary, Nabil; Guraya, Shaista Salman
Introduction: Mentorship is increasingly recognized as a foundational stone within Graduate Medical Education (GME), contributing to clinical competency, scholarly engagement, professional identity formation, and psychological well-being. Despite its growing recognition, mentorship in GME remains inconsistently structured, under-theorized, and variably evaluated. This conceptual and structural ambiguity hampers the ability to design, compare, and scale mentorship efforts meaningfully across settings. This scoping review aimed to systematically explore the structure, theoretical foundations, evaluation approaches, and reported outcomes of mentorship programs in GME, and to develop a conceptual framework to guide the design of context-sensitive, outcome-aligned mentorship interventions.
“Busting the hidden curriculum” a realist and innovative perspective to foster professional behaviors
(Frontiers Media SA, 2024-12-04) Guraya, Shaista Salman
Contemporary health professions education has long delineated the desired attributes of medical professionalism in the form of standard curricula and their role in forming professional behaviors (PBs) among aspiring doctors. However, existing research has shown the contradictory and powerful role of hidden curriculum (HC) in negatively influencing medical students’ PBs through unspoken or implicit academic, cultural, or social standards and practices. These contrasting messages of formal curricula and HC lead to discordance and incongruence in future healthcare professionals developing professional identity formation. There is little research on PB modifying educational strategies and their determinants that medical schools adopt to bust the impact of HC. Consequently, it is unclear how the right PBs can be influenced, entrenched, and inculcated in undergraduate medical students, especially in their early clinical placements. The lack of such insight highlights a critical gap in the literature, nudging educators to take a realist stance to deal with this problem. Behavior psychology stresses shaping medical students’ values and beliefs as salient mediators that influence intentions to pursue future PBs. Curiosity prevails about what would guide the educational interventions to target this behavior change. To help understand this concept, we present our design-based innovative perspective about PROfessionalism in Partnership for Education Research (PROPER) shaped by pluralistic theoretical models in the context of two European medical schools with diverse medical students, highlighting its non-parochial and transferable nature.
Medical students’ perception of assessment and its effects on their learning in Dubai: a convergent mixed methods study
(Frontiers Media SA, 2025-08-04) Ennab, Farah; Otaki, Farah; Guraya, Shaista Salman; Amir-Rad, Fatemeh; Lakhtakia, Ritu
Background Enhanced learning is achieved when assessments are effectively designed in alignment with the learning objectives and supported by ongoing research in the field. Although it is universally acknowledged that assessments are essential in medical education, little is known about assessment policy and characteristics, and its influence on learning and teaching in medical schools in the Middle East and North Africa region (MENA). The purpose of this study is to investigate the perception of medical students of the assessment method implemented in a medical school in Dubai, United Arab Emirates. Methods: A convergent mixed methods study design was employed. Quantitative and qualitative data were independently collected and analyzed. The quantitative component comprised a cross-sectional observational survey design where a tailormade survey with a five-point Likert-type scale was administered to 87 undergraduate medical students. The corresponding quantitative data was analyzed using the Statistical Package for Social Sciences (SPSS, version 27.0). As for the qualitative data, it was collected through a series of focus group sessions aimed at exploring students’ perception of assessment and its impact on their learning. The corresponding analysis was inductive, following the six-step approach introduced by Braun and Clarke. Following that, merging of the information brought about from the two sources generated meta-inferences, which raised the validity of the study’s findings. Results: The percentage of the total average of agreement of the current assessment method efficacy, according to a tailormade survey protocol of 28 components, measured using a five-point Likert-type scale, was 62.24%. This percentage was calculated by dividing the overall mean (i.e., 87.13) by 140 since it is the maximum possible value (i.e., five of the Likert-type scale multiplied by 28 components) and multiplying it by 100. The inductive thematic analysis of the data, collected via focus group sessions, yielded a novel conceptual framework: “Medical Students” Take on Assessment Method’, with two overarching themes: Development Process and Consequences. Within the Development Process theme, two categories emerged: Assessment plan and Student support. As for the Consequences theme, it included three other categories: Output, Outcomes, and Impact. Lastly, the following four meta-inferences emerged from integrating the quantitative with the qualitative analysis findings: Processual perspective, Learners’ reaction, Inclusiveness, and Ripple effects. Conclusion: This study reinforced the importance of effectively assessing medical students’ competences while maximizing the learning value of the encapsulating assessment method. It showed that it is not about making choices around discrete aspects of assessment, but rather to consider an assessment method holistically as dynamic processes with several moving parts. Ideally, assessment methods should be designed, implemented, and maintained in ways that would maximize their learning value, taking into account the corresponding context and learners’ perception.
Unfolding insights about resilience and its coping strategies by medical academics and healthcare professionals at their workplaces: a thematic qualitative analysis
(2025-02-04) Guraya, Shaista Salman
Background: Health care professionals (HCPs) and medical and health academics (MHAs) strive to maintain and promote population health through evidence-based medical education and practice. At their workplaces, due to the demanding nature of work, HCPs and MHAs face substantial degrees of physiological, psychological, and physical stress, including burnout. Resilience has therefore become a fundamental necessity in the medical field. Our research aimed to acquire an in-depth comprehension of how HCPs and MHAs understand, cultivate, and sustain resilience when confronted with workplace challenges and stressors.
Unfolding the empathic insights and tendencies among medical students of two gulf institutions using interpersonal reactivity index
(2024-09) Guraya, Shaista Salman
Abstract Background: Empathy is an essential core competency for future doctors. Unfortunately, the medical curriculum is infamously known to burn out aspiring doctors, which may potentially lead to a decline in empathy among medical students. This research was planned to understand the evolution of empathic approaches among students across the curriculum using the Interpersonal reactivity index (IRI) as a benchmark at the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland - Medical University of Bahrain (RCSI-MUB) and University of Sharjah (UoS). Methods: We adopted a cross-sectional design and administered an online survey to the medical students of RCSI-MUB and UoS using a modified version of the IRI along with its three subscales of empathic concern (EC), perspective taking (PT), and personal distress (PD). To identify intra- and inter-institutional variations in empathy scores, the Analysis of Variance (ANOVA) was performed separately for each institution and with both institutions combined. A two-way ANOVA was conducted for the comparison between years and institutions. For the subscale analysis of EC, PT, and PD, we used one-way ANOVA for significant differences between years at both institutions. For the gender-effect analysis, t-test was performed to examine the differences in total IRI scores at both institutions combined and at each institution separately. Additionally, an Analysis of Covariance (ANCOVA) was done to identify the influence of gender on empathy scores. Results: A total of 140 students from both institutions participated in this study. We found a fluctuating pattern of empathy scores without a clear trend across the years. The sub-scales of EC, PD, and PT across academic years at both institutions showed significant differences within the EC at RCSI-MUB (p = 0.003). No significant differences were identified across other years from both institutions. There were significant differences between empathy scores from RCSI-MUB and UoS for EC (p = 0.011). Additionally, a pronounced interaction effect between year and institution was observed for PT (p = 0.032). The gender-wise analysis showed that female students had higher empathy scores than males (p = 0.004). The ANCOVA for IRI score results revealed a p-value of 0.023, indicating that gender plays a crucial role in empathy levels among medical students. The ANCOVA results revealed a p-value of 0.022 in the EC subscale. Conclusion: Our study unveiled intricate patterns in empathy development among medical students across years and genders at RCSI-MUB and UoS. These congruences and dissimilarities in empathy scores signal a subjective understanding of empathy by medical students. The disparities in understanding may encourage medical educators to embed empathy in standard medical curricula for better healthcare outcomes.
Unfolding the empathic insights and tendencies among medical students of two gulf institutions using interpersonal reactivity index.
(2024-09-09) Guraya, Shaista Salman
Empathy is an essential core competency for future doctors. Unfortunately, the medical curriculum is infamously known to burn out aspiring doctors, which may potentially lead to a decline in empathy among medical students. This research was planned to understand the evolution of empathic approaches among students across the curriculum using the Interpersonal reactivity index (IRI) as a benchmark at the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland - Medical University of Bahrain (RCSI-MUB) and University of Sharjah (UoS).