‘Something a bit more deep, more challenging’: the impact of critical health psychology in medicine

There has been a substantial body of research into the professional identity development of medical students. When do they start to feel like doctors? How does this happen? Current research at Bond University, Australia examines this from both student and educator perspectives. From a series of interviews conducted with students across all year cohorts and educators in multi-professional roles, it has emerged that students within our undergraduate programme feel they have assumed their professional roles across different points in their learning and within many contexts. Such instances range from the acquisition of procedural skills and dissection activity through to communication skills training and critical reflection. A less well documented consideration, however, is how to integrate critical health psychology alongside the junctures that students identify as pivotal to their identity development, and within medical education in general. This paper presents data from the aforementioned interview study and also considers the practical and conceptual challenges inherent to introducing students to a critical heath psychology perspective within medicine.