Case development is more than the sum of creating a patient illness landscape for students to navigate. There is a social and ethical responsibility to sensitively and accurately articulate how a patient’s medical history dovetails with their unique world view, culture, values and beliefs, without essentializing or moralizing. To prevent reproducing stigmatizing stereotypes, and make visible our taken for granted assumptions, we need to embrace health professions as both a social and clinical undertaking, and understand how the echoes of pedagogical experience can profoundly influence students’ professional values and attitudes in clinical practice.

Engaging critical perspectives, this submission will address SBE’s potential impact of reproducing healthcare inequities through poor scenario design and outline considerations for distinguishing and ameliorating essentializing and stigmatizing representations.