Milestone for a New Curriculum
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Last May, 128 newly dubbed doctors, each hooded by his or her own faculty adviser, tossed their tasseled caps to the sky and made history in the process. The class of 2011 was the first one at Emory to have gone through all four years of the medical school's new curriculum, which was inaugurated in 2007 and has been tweaked, added to, and subtracted from in a continual process ever since that time, based on regular feedback from students and faculty.
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In this section Preparing for the "silver tsunami" Slideshow key 1. Faculty and students are changing the lives of patients and families in profund ways—and finding themselves changed in the process. 2. First-year resident Zwade Marshall helped found the Emory Pipeline Program with fellow student Sam Funt. Directed at high-schoolers below the poverty line, the program exposes students to rigorous college-levelresearch to foster interest in the sciences. 3. Faculty members Sheryl Heron and Jason Liebzeit devised a new month-long "capstone" course for fourth-year students to help prepare them for residency training. Titled "Passion, Purpose, and People," the course runs the month of April and covers areas such as managing patient hand-offs, integrating lab and clinical science, nuances of commonly prescribed medications, leadership skills, palliative care, new restrictions on residents' work hours, and leading a balanced life. "Students won't understand the importance of this course till their first day of residency," says Heron. "Before they start their residency, they don't know what they don't know." 4. "I always appreciated the role my faculty mentor played in developing my clinical thinking skills. Only recently have I begun to appreciate the role he played in my personal and professional development. I hope one day I can impact a student's life as profoundly and positively as he has mine." Sarah Rae Strunk, class of 2011, now a resident at Brigham & Women's Hospital, Boston. Her faculty mentor was Joseph Hilinski in infectious diseases. 5. In the applications phase of the new curriculum, students spend a half day every other week for 12 weeks with a primary care physician like Clyde Partin. . |
What was new about the new curriculum?
A semester was dedicated to what constitutes human health (as opposed to the more traditional focus only on disease). Students had increased interaction with patients in the classroom setting (unlike previous curricula with strict and somewhat artificial divisions between basic science and clinical learning). A systems-based approach to teaching meant that while students were dissecting the heart in anatomy, they also were learning about heart disease, drugs to treat it, the epidemiology behind it, ways to prevent it, and, the most powerful part for many students, its impact on patients' lives.
Outpatient care was emphasized much more than in past classes, and students spent considerable time with primary care providers in the Atlanta area. A mandatory five-month discovery period during which students did research at the CDC, NIH, here at Emory, across the United States, and around the world seemed so natural to them that they were surprised when it often was the main topic of interest in their residency interviews. And this research experience perhaps was the reason, says Bill Eley, dean of education, that this class had the most successful residency match in the school¿s history.
Faculty members believe one power of the new curriculum—and one reason the teaching faculty have never been happier—is the most faculty-intensive and supportive small group society system anywhere. Students spend four years working in small groups of eight led by the same faculty member during that entire period. The adviser is a practicing physician who serves as teacher and mentor, available 24-7 and a model of how a good physician handles the medical, logistic, ethical, and emotional demands of patient care.
Everything I wish I had known
Entering students received A Guide to Medical School Success, a 16-page booklet written by local educators and Emory faculty with advice on topics such as building memorization skills, managing time, setting priorities, and maintaining balance. A recent survey of students suggests that the new curriculum is helping students avoid feelings of burnout and depersonalization that can result in response to the intense process of learning to be a doctor.
Preparing for the "silver tsunami"
One of the strengths of the medical school¿s new curriculum is its emphasis on experiential learning. As part of a module on aging, for example, students are outfitted with colored ski goggles, arm braces, and heavy backpacks to simulate the loss of vision, strength, dexterity, and mobility that accompanies aging. The students heard from patients, including one with advanced prostate cancer who was coping with his own mortality. They observed one patient (this one an actor) age 10 years a day, changing from a vibrant menopausal 50 to an 80-year-old dying of cancer. They heard family caregivers discuss their struggle to manage a dizzying array of doctors and medications—and how caring for an elderly mom or dad had changed family dynamics. And they were surprised by the wide variety of cases and issues faced by geriatricians at Wesley Woods Hospital, whose Twitter feeds they followed daily.
New fields, new PhD programs
The medical school played a key role in developing two new Emory PhD programs that debuted in fall 2011, one in biomedical informatics and the other in cancer biology. The first takes advantage of expertise in Emory's Center for Comprehensive Informatics, which uses computer technology to analyze and interpret vast amounts of biomedical data to help clinicians design the best treatments for individual patients. Students in cancer biology train with faculty in the Winship Cancer Institute, Georgia's only NCI-designated center, and, depending on their research interests, with other medical faculty as well as faculty from public health; Yerkes National Primate Research Center; Emory College departments of chemistry, biology and physics; and next-door neighbor CDC. Students can tailor training ranging from basic mechanisms that drive cancer initiation and progression to more clinical and translational aspects of cancer therapeutics and drug discovery.
