Faculty member receives National Humanism in Medicine Medal from Gold Humanism Honor Society
The award recognizes Dr. Wayne McCormack’s work on a peer nomination form used by most of the society’s chapters
Wayne T. McCormack, Ph.D.
June 17, 2022 – Every year, as medical students around the nation fill out peer nomination forms for the Gold Humanism Honor Society, jotting down the classmates who have the best listening skills or who they would want to care for them during a medical emergency, one additional name should be recognized: Wayne T. McCormack, Ph.D.
McCormack, a distinguished teaching scholar and professor in the department of pathology, immunology and laboratory medicine at the UF College of Medicine, led the creation of a peer nomination survey for the Gold Humanism Honor Society, which inducts about 15% of the graduating medical school class annually.
The Arnold P. Gold Foundation, a nonprofit that hosts the Gold Humanism Honor Society, recently recognized McCormack for his research and dedication to humanism, demonstrated by his development of the survey, with a National Humanism in Medicine Medal. McCormack and 10 colleagues nationwide were honored at the foundation’s annual gala June 9 in New York.
“It’s pretty cool to think that something that started off as a side research project turned into something that is so widely used,” McCormack said.
In 2001, McCormack was part of a cohort in the Master Educators in Medical Education faculty development program and working on an education research project with Parker Small Jr., M.D., then senior associate dean for graduate education, to improve a UF College of Medicine survey that established rankings of medical students that identified exemplars in professional skills and social skills. Results were determined using a complicated statistical method called factor analysis. However, McCormack and Small learned that similar results could be found by counting the number of nominations instead.
“There are many ways to analyze the data, and it turned out not to make a difference if we asked for six nominations or only three for each question, or whether or not we weighted the scores based on the order names were written in,” McCormack said. “It always ended up with about the same 15% of students standing out from the rest of the class.”
When the Arnold P. Gold Foundation heard about the UF College of Medicine’s use of the peer nomination survey, the organization asked McCormack to present the team’s findings in 2002. He then worked with the foundation to create a new version of the peer nomination survey to identify exemplars for humanism in medicine, using a list of humanism-centric questions to ask medical students of their peers, such as which classmates best personify the quote, “The secret of good patient care lies in caring for the patient,” and which classmates have shown exceptional interest in service to their communities.
Today, most of the 181 GHHS chapters around the world use a form of the survey to select society members. Students are generally asked to write down the first three classmates who come to mind for each of the six questions. The nominations are then counted, and the highest scorers for a subset of questions are invited to join the honor society.
Twenty-four UF medical students from the class of 2022 were recently inducted into UF’s chapter of the Gold Humanism Honor Society, the Chapman Society.
“The power of peer evaluation is that students know each other better than faculty ever can, with the amount of time they spend around one another in the classroom, in volunteer activities, socially and most importantly, with patients,” McCormack said.
McCormack, one of a few non-M.D. members of the honor society, said he was excited to work on the survey with colleagues from across the nation. Arnold P. Gold, M.D., the foundation’s namesake, once told him that the society’s growth in the past 20 years could not have happened without him.
“It’s the highest praise I’ve received in my life,” McCormack said.
