Why identity safety in health professions education matters

Her PhD focuses on identity safety, which is the freedom to be yourself and to express yourself authentically without fear of judgement. “This is a relatively new concept,” Shika explains. “We are mostly trying to understand what it means to different people, and we would like to recognise that everybody is different. Instead of a one-size-fits-all approach which tries to create equality by doing the same thing for everybody, it may be more useful to pay attention to each student’s needs and see how we can fit that into our education methods.”

Why is it important to consider identity safety in education? “Research shows that some students do not see people like themselves in the field and feel like they do not belong in their education,” Shika says. “This has a lot of impact on the way we learn. It can affect your well-being, and influence how much information we remember and how well we perform in exams. Furthermore, it can lead to students dropping out and not pursuing the profession. This is troublesome, because there is a big shortage of healthcare workers.”

Students who do not feel like they belong can also start changing parts of themselves to fit into the norm, or what they think is the norm. “This impacts the diversity of the workforce,” Shika says. “We would like to see people with many different identities and backgrounds there, because it has implications on, amongst others, how they treat patients and what research focuses on. For example, historically, there has been less research focused on women’s health, which has been linked to an underrepresentation of women in the field. The same applies for instance to the experiences and health needs of racial groups or trans people.”

In total, Shika will be doing four studies. “The first two will focus on medical students, probably bachelor students in the international track of medicine in Maastricht,” she explains. “In the other two studies, we would like to look at educators to see how they experience and approach identity safety in their students, and what challenges they face. I think it is important to include both students and teachers, because they both play a role in creating the learning environment. By looking at the students’ and the teachers’ needs, the faculty can support both at the same time.”

What does Shika hope to achieve with her research? “I would like to raise awareness about differences in people and expand the definition of inclusion,” she says. “We have different measures to make sure the student body is diverse. However, I think we can put a lot more effort into understanding what happens to students in education, because we still see a lot of them dropping out. It would be nice to understand the barriers they face once they are in the educational program and how we can overcome them. Within education, I would like to build a basis for strategies to help students become safer and feel stronger in their identities, and not feel like they have to leave parts of themselves behind. I think it is important to retain diversity in all work fields and I would like to contribute to that in some way. It is very ambitious, but what I like about research is that it takes a step towards building that knowledge base.”

Text: Joëlle van Wissen