• Medical Education & Training

We thank Shakir, Recor, Sheehan and Reynolds for their interesting article exploring mindfulness and emotional intelligence (EI) within the medical field.1 As current and recently graduated medical students, there are several insights we would like to share, as we have recently been exposed to the modern medical school curriculum.

We have found that early immersion of clinical experience is already heavily prominent throughout the current modern medical school curriculum. UK medical schools have now evolved to employ highly trained actors as simulated patients within the first years to incorporate a largely undirected patient experience which is unpredictable and can lead to awkward and aggressive situations with the option to pause the interaction at any moment. Not only does this allow the student to develop their communication and handling of patients in a variety of scenarios, it allows the student to pause and reflect on their EI in each scenario.

The medical school curriculum then shifts towards clinical experience …