Table 3.

Representative Quotes From Participant Focus Groups and Interviews, Divided by Theme and Subtheme

	Themes and Categories	Representative Quotes
Theme 1: Curriculum format
1.A	Longitudinal or semester long?	In other words, it really needs to be throughout medical school. I mean, maybe at the end, there’s something that has a crescendo, but I think if you do nothing, put something, and then there’s internship, it’s not going to be powerful enough to withstand the huge tidal waves of internship, you know?—HMS faculty member (RI30)
1.B	Required or elective?	So I think that in terms of a general entity that would involve spirituality or religion as part of the curriculum would need to be something that students can take as an elective, because they would then select themselves out to be people who say I have an interest in this or not.—HMS faculty member (AO07)
1.C	Experiential or lecture based?	I think that my initial reaction is that, am I really going to learn anything? Is it just going to be a lot of stuff that’s just very obvious? Is it going to be a lot of PowerPoint lectures that are not going to help me in any way? So my inclination would be that like the course should be 100% practical, it should be very much very experiential.—HMS student (JR12)
Theme 2: Curriculum content
2.A	Personal religious and spiritual growth	I think the first thing we’d need would have to be some kind of self-awareness exercise where people list a bunch of things that they feel they need to work on, need to get better at, and then trying to address these with either people who are professionals or people who they trust and respect or are more experienced, one at a time. I think it has to start with some kind of self-inspection exercise.—HMS faculty member (AO07)
2.B	Professional integration of R/S values	Any course that’s going to talk about how do you engage someone in their spirituality, should have, I would think, some component of observing someone who’s really good at it.—HMS student (ML08)
2.C	Addressing patient needs	I mean, I think the core of it should be engaging a patient in a spiritual discussion. Not necessarily you divulging your spiritual beliefs, but sort of being able to engage them and get a feel for what their belief system is like and how you can best go about respecting that and incorporating that into your medical care that you’re giving them.—HMS student (DF08)
2.D.	Structural/institutional dynamics	I think there’s stunningly little interaction between medical students and nurses. I’m surprised even at this level how I hear disparaging remarks from classmates about nursing staff, and I think we have so little appreciation for what they do, and nurses are spending so much more time with patients than we are.—HMS student (KH10)
2.E	Controversial social issues	Also, I would encourage the course to be controversial. I think back to what I said earlier about how I felt that the only real, agreed upon principle in the medical ethics base was autonomy and informed consent. If you really want meaningful reflection around being a caregiver and thinking about values and principles, give us an article by some prominent Catholic thinker about why abortion is wrong, and let us talk about it. Give us an article by someone from the American Enterprise Institute about why affirmative action is just terrible and destructive to our institutions, and let us talk about it.—HMS student (JG24)

HMS = Harvard Medical School.