A scoping review on the relationship between mental wellbeing and medical professionalism

ABSTRACT

Background

Mental wellbeing issues among medical students are common, and their relationship to medical professionalism is debated. Few studies have attempted to link such issues with undergraduate medical education. This review aimed to advance the knowledge on this matter by exploring the relationship between mental wellbeing and medical professionalism in undergraduate medical education.

Methods

We collected the literature about mental wellbeing and medical professionalism (published from 1 January 1986 to 31 March 2021) from the Web of Science, PubMed, Scopus and ScienceDirect databases using the search terms ‘mental wellbeing’ and ‘medical professionalism’.We included all peer-reviewed articles in which mental wellbeing and medical professionalism in the undergraduate medical education context were the central topics regardless of the age range, nationality, race and gender of the participants.

Results

From the 13,076 Iinitially found articles, 16 were included. These 16 articles were from nine countries in four different continents, which all together helped us find answer to our research question using extracted points relating to the main study themes (mental wellbeing and medical professionalism). Under theme 1 (mental wellbeing), six subthemes emerged: burnout, stress, depression, disappointment, depersonalisation and conscientiousness. Theme 2 (medical professionalism), on the other hand, had five subthemes: empathy, academic performance, compassion, unprofessional behaviour and professionalism. A significant inverse association was found between empathy and burnout. Academic performance was also related to burnout. At the same time, empathy was found to have a varied association with stress. Moreover, compassion was found to alleviate burnout and nurture professional gratification.

Conclusion

The medical professionalism attributes were found to deteriorate as the mental wellbeing issues grow. This can harm medical students’ overall health, current learning abilities and future attitudes towards their patients. Explicit primary research is thus required to examine and intervene in the cause-effect relationship between medical professionalism and mental wellbeing.

KEYWORDS:

• Medical professionalism attributes
• mental wellbeing
• burnout
• empathy
• stress
• relationship
• scoping review

Acknowledgements

The authors thank Universiti Sains Malaysia for supporting this work.

Authors’ contributions

All the authors made substantial contributions to this research. KS contributed to the study concept and design, data analyses and manuscript drafting. MSBY contributed to the study concept, drafting and critical revisions of the manuscript. WNA, MAY and MZM aided in the critical revisions of the manuscript. All the authors approved the final version of the manuscript.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

Research University Grant (8012368), Universiti Sains Malaysia