Accepted for/Published in: JMIR Medical Education
Date Submitted: Nov 8, 2024
Open Peer Review Period: Nov 11, 2024 - Jan 6, 2025
Date Accepted: Jul 16, 2025
(closed for review but you can still tweet)
Warning: This is an author submission that is not peer-reviewed or edited. Preprints - unless they show as "accepted" - should not be relied on to guide clinical practice or health-related behavior and should not be reported in news media as established information.
Effects of the hidden curriculum in medical education, a scoping review
ABSTRACT
Background:
Medical education has evolved to train skilled and reliable professionals, giving great importance to the hidden curriculum and its contribution to medical professionalism and humanism.
Objective:
To analyze the available evidence on the benefits and adverse effects of the hidden curriculum in medical education.
Methods:
A scoping review of the literature available in the indexed databases PubMed, Scopus, Science Direct and LILACS with MeSH descriptors was conducted on the effects of the hidden curriculum in medical education between 2000 and April 2024. Twenty-six papers were selected for review.
Results:
We found studies from 10 countries, mainly descriptive and cross-sectional, which showed that the hidden curriculum has benefits and adverse effects in medical education. These include the transmission of implicit values, and the influence on forming skills and professional identity. It was found that some elements contribute to the integral development of students, and others generate challenges that affect the quality of medical education. Likewise, the need for further research to design of implementation strategies in the different medical schools is described.
Conclusions:
The hidden curriculum proves to have both a positive and negative impact on the attitudes and values of medical students. The need to generate greater awareness and proactive strategies in educational institutions to improve the quality of training and promote the holistic development of future health professionals is highlighted.
Citation
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Copyright
© The authors. All rights reserved. This is a privileged document currently under peer-review/community review (or an accepted/rejected manuscript). Authors have provided JMIR Publications with an exclusive license to publish this preprint on it's website for review and ahead-of-print citation purposes only. While the final peer-reviewed paper may be licensed under a cc-by license on publication, at this stage authors and publisher expressively prohibit redistribution of this draft paper other than for review purposes.