What can we learn form talented General Practitioners and Elderly Care Medicine Specialists? A protocol for a qualitative interview study

1.BackgroundSome postgraduate medical trainees in the General Practice (GP) and Elderly Care Medicine (ECM) training program, are considered being talented trainees (TTs) by their peers, teachers (at the institute), trainers (in clinical practice), and/or patients. We are currently unaware if these TTs are trained to meet their maximal potential or whether they are not fully stimulated during their learning process in the postgraduate training program. It is important to acknowledge them, because if we fail to acknowledge and suitably challenge TTs, it may lower their work ethos and satisfaction or cause loss of our TTs. As a first step, we will explore the way TTs make use of the learning possibilities provided during the postgraduate training program and what stimulates and hinders their learning in the clinical workplace. Knowledge on this subject is important for two reasons. First, knowing how TTs learn, can provide insights for improving learning in the workplace for all trainees. Secondly, with this knowledge, we can enrich the development of TTs. Thirdly, enhancement of workplace-based learning might lead to higher quality of learning, resulting in health care professionals trained to their full potential. Methods and analysisWe will address these questions in an open approach, conducting explorative qualitative semi-structured interview study with GPs and ECM specialists, who during their postgraduate training were seen as talented by their third year supervisors and completed their postgraduate medical training two or less than two years ago. We will perform the interviews in Dutch. We expect that the interview will not take longer than 45-60 minutes per interview. We plan to start at the beginning of 2023 and will continue until data sufficiency is reached. All interviews will be audio-recorded and transcribed verbatim. We will use thematic analysis to analyse the transcripts of the interviews. This is an iterative process of familiarizing yourself with the data, generating initial codes, searching for themes, reviewing themes, defining and naming themes. We will use MAXQDA 2022 software. Ethical considerationsThe Ethics committee of the Dutch Association of Medical Education (NVMO) gave ethical approval for this work (NERB dossier number: 2022.7.3). Data availability statementAll data produced in the present study are available upon reasonable request to the authors. Funding statementThis study is funded by ZonMw (project number 839130008).