Death and dying in Postgraduate Medical Education: A longitudinal critical discourse analysis (2024 - 2026)

This study is part of a broader study that followed a group of twelve medical students through their degree. We are now following seven of these learners through the first two years of residency.

Operating within a critical discourse analysis theoretical frame, we are conducting in-depth interviews with students to explore how experiences of death are discursively shaped across the crucial transition from medical school to residency.

Professional norms and power relations are enacted through what is said—and left unsaid. Language does not merely convey residents’ individual perspectives on patient death; instead, everyday talk in clinical learning environments is a social practice that actively produces and reproduces professional norms. These norms can be understood as discourses shaping how physicians are expected to talk about, respond to, and make meaning of patient death.

Examining how medical learners negotiate, reproduce, or resist these discourses as they transition to residency can therefore shed light on how professional roles and practices relating to death are constructed in medical education, and how changes in learners’ responsibilities influence which discourses are possible.