The NHS 10-year plan: teaching opportunities and challenges.

Haunted Curriculum Meeting Summary

The discussion focused on the concept of the “Haunted Curriculum”—hidden emotional, ethical, and structural challenges within medical education—and how to create psychologically safe spaces for tutors and students to name and address these ghosts.

Key Questions Raised

• How can we co-create safe spaces for open dialogue, including educators’ own traumas?

• How does colonialism shape medical curricula, and how do we guard against it?

Identified Ghosts

• Emotional suppression

• Perfectionism and infallibility

• Hierarchy and power

• Hidden patient

• Structural inequity

• Death and mortality

• Obsession with quantification and deviation from a “norm” (linked to imperial/colonial frameworks)

Insights from Participants

• Education carries ghosts from the past—colonialism, gender, race, hierarchy, power, and wealth.

• Despite progress, much remains unresolved; conversations often leave issues “up in the air.”

• Trigger warnings before sensitive discussions were suggested.

• Decolonising the curriculum is essential.

• Reverse mentoring can empower those facing structural barriers to educate others.

Strategies Proposed

• Make the hidden curriculum explicit.

• Integrate robust wellness and professional formation.

• Flatten hierarchies systematically.

• Formalize education on structural and social determinants of health.

• Normalize vulnerability and mentorship.

• Revamp assessment practices.

• Honour narrative and indigenous stories alongside evidence-based medicine.

Core Principle Psychological safety is critical for meaningful engagement and transformation.