Currently submitted to: JMIR Medical Education
Date Submitted: Feb 25, 2026
Open Peer Review Period: Feb 26, 2026 - Apr 23, 2026
(closed for review but you can still tweet)
NOTE: This is an unreviewed Preprint
Warning: This is a unreviewed preprint (What is a preprint?). Readers are warned that the document has not been peer-reviewed by expert/patient reviewers or an academic editor, may contain misleading claims, and is likely to undergo changes before final publication, if accepted, or may have been rejected/withdrawn (a note "no longer under consideration" will appear above).
Peer review me: Readers with interest and expertise are encouraged to sign up as peer-reviewer, if the paper is within an open peer-review period (in this case, a "Peer Review Me" button to sign up as reviewer is displayed above). All preprints currently open for review are listed here. Outside of the formal open peer-review period we encourage you to tweet about the preprint.
Citation: Please cite this preprint only for review purposes or for grant applications and CVs (if you are the author).
Final version: If our system detects a final peer-reviewed "version of record" (VoR) published in any journal, a link to that VoR will appear below. Readers are then encourage to cite the VoR instead of this preprint.
Settings: If you are the author, you can login and change the preprint display settings, but the preprint URL/DOI is supposed to be stable and citable, so it should not be removed once posted.
Submit: To post your own preprint, simply submit to any JMIR journal, and choose the appropriate settings to expose your submitted version as preprint.
Warning: This is an author submission that is not peer-reviewed or edited.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.
Bridging Inner Growth and Global Health: A Position Paper on Embedding IDGs in Health Professions Curricula
ABSTRACT
Global transformations, including demographic aging, climate-related health risks, and rapid technological acceleration are reshaping health systems and the competencies required of future healthcare professionals. Yet current curricula often struggle to integrate these complex challenges in a coherent and future-oriented manner. This Eye Opener highlights the potential of the Inner Development Goals (IDGs) as an underutilized conceptual framework for enriching competency-based education in the health professions. The IDGs emphasize five dimensions: Being, Thinking, Relating, Collaborating, and Acting that align with key professional capacities such as self-awareness, systems thinking, empathy, interprofessional teamwork, and ethical action. Drawing on examples from geriatric care, climate-adapted practice, and AI-supported clinical reasoning, we illustrate how IDG-aligned learning outcomes can complement existing competency frameworks by fostering inner capacities essential for clinical judgement and person centered care. At the same time, we provide a critical reflection on potential risks, including over individualization of responsibility, insufficient attention to structural determinants of health, and tensions with assessment-driven educational cultures. Rather than proposing IDGs as a complete solution, this article argues that they offer a valuable conceptual entry point for rethinking how health professions education can prepare learners for the uncertainties, ethical complexities, and interdependencies of contemporary healthcare. The IDGs can help open new pedagogical and conceptual spaces, encouraging educators to design learning environments that support both technical proficiency and the inner capacities needed for navigating an increasingly complex world.
Citation
Request queued. Please wait while the file is being generated. It may take some time.
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.