The ability to reflect has been described as an essential feature of professional and competent clinical practice. Reflection has recently been linked to promoting the effective use of feedback in medical education and associated with improved diagnostic accuracy, suggesting promising results. Reflective writing pedagogy has proliferated within medical education to support the development of reflective capacity, broaden empathy through a deeper understanding of patients' experiences of illness and promote physician wellbeing. At Alpert Med, 'interactive' reflective writing with targeted individualised feedback from interdisciplinary faculty to reflective writing students has been implemented in the medical and family medicine internship course as an educational method to achieve these goals. Such initiatives, however, raise fundamental questions about the definition of reflection, the design of the programme, the effectiveness of the methods and the evaluation of outcomes. This article considers the opportunities and challenges of implementing reflective writing programmes to promote reflective capacity in medical education.
https://bmcmededuc.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12909-020-02336-6