VOL 2, No 5, May 2000
Changes on tap for fourth year
The latest planned changes to the undergraduate curriculum will result in the creation of new fourth-year elective formats and a clinical advising system to help students sort through their options. (See story below.)Led by co-chairs William Turner, M.D., and Jerry Ondo, Ph.D., the Fourth Year Electives Task Force set out last year to review the quality and effectiveness of senior electives.
“Our goal is to ensure students are prepared effectively for a competitive internship and residency,” said Turner, chairman of urology.
Changes presented to the Undergraduate Curriculum Committee and scheduled for potential implementation in the 2001 - 2002 academic year will add longitudinal, multidisciplinary and shorter, two-week electives to supplement current month-long offerings.
Two-week electives will allow students to sample radiation oncology, emergency medicine, ophthalmology, alternative medicine and radiology. These won't replace existing four-week electives, but “they'll allow students to get a taste of what those fields are like even if they don't plan to pursue a career in that area,” said Ondo, professor of physiology and neuroscience. Elective topics were selected based on student requests.
Health Care Management—a look at the business side of the medical profession—will become the first longitudinal fourth-year elective. Students will meet for about one hour each week through the course of a semester.
“Most students have no idea about reimbursement and insurance issues or the government's involvement in medicine, and these are things they need to know,” Turner said. “This is an elective all students need to take.” Other longitudinal electives are also planned.
A multidisciplinary, or bunched elective will offer students the opportunity to study a particular disease or disorder. While topics are still being finalized, Ondo said, a bunched elective on eating disorders, for example, might work like this: one week of training in nutrition; one week of training in behavioral medicine as related to nutrition; and a one to two week experience in the psychology and psychiatry of eating disorders.
A survey of elective course directors and former College of Medicine students will help the task force assess the need for further changes—including the elimination of current electives or the creation of new ones.
The College of Medicine Class of 1999 was recently asked to evaluate the electives they took on a rating scale of 1 to 10 and offer comments about each elective's usefulness and suggestions for improvement. About 60 percent of the class responded, according to task force member Candace Gillespie.
“Overall, students were very pleased,” Gillespie said. “Based on the comments we've received, some electives will be looked at more closely to ensure students are getting the experience they expect.”
Course directors for each elective have been asked to submit relevant goals and objectives. Based on these responses, the Catalog of Electives will be updated to better reflect what's offered. Then students will be better able to choose electives that are relevant to their academic and professional goals.
The Task Force also hopes to institute a formal committee to review fourth-year electives on a yearly basis. “Currently, no method exists for regular, formal review of electives,” Ondo said.
These changes, Turner said, will ensure the fourth year continues to be as beneficial as possible for our students.
Students to benefit from guidance of clinical advisors
A new clinical advising system will help medical students make more informed choices when selecting fourth-year electives—and in turn strengthen their residency applications.The system will match rising third-year students with a clinical faculty member practicing a specialty the student is considering for his or her career.
“Students
need help selecting a career and learning how to best prepare for that
career while in medical school,” said third-year student Nelly
Welsch.
The College of Medicine (COM) Student Council identified the need for an advising system in 1997 and the council's Clinical Career Advisement Committee began to work towards that end. In the process, the committee discovered that faculty members of the Fourth Year Electives Task Force strongly supported this goal. “The faculty want to ensure students get the guidance they need to maximize the usefulness of senior-year electives,” said task force co-chairs Jerry Ondo, Ph.D., and William Turner, M.D.
“Everything
came together perfectly after that,” said Cynthia
Leaphart, second-year student. Leaphart and Welsch co-chair
the Clinical Career Advisement Committee.
The undergraduate curriculum renewal currently underway presented a perfect opportunity to make the change—and so the advising system was created.
This spring, second-year students were asked to rank their top three career interests. Now, they're being matched with a clinical faculty member in one of those three fields. Students will receive the name of their advisors during orientation for third-year rotations.
“Through an advisor, I’ll have a more realistic picture of what’s involved in the field I’m interested in,” Leaphart said.
In recent years, medical students had to find faculty members on their own if they had questions about a career field. Sometimes, Welsch said, this was not an easy task, especially if the specialty was not one that students were required to rotate through, like dermatology. The new system formalizes the advising process.
“Instead of finding out about electives by word of mouth or making decisions haphazardly, students will have a clinician to help guide them,” Turner said.
Clinical faculty, who can advise no more than two students each academic year, have been overwhelmingly positive and eager to serve as advisors, Leaphart said.
The COM Student Council plans to publish a booklet with suggested topics student can address with their advisors, Web sites with information on residency programs and different medical fields, and hints as they begin the residency interview process—including questions to ask residency directors.
Students are expected to meet with their advisors regularly. If a student's career interest changes, his or her advisor can help select another clinician to assist with selection of electives and provide career advice.
Leaphart and Welsch hope that clinical advising can eventually begin during the first year. “The summer after your first year of medical school is a great time to get clinical or research experience. An advisor could steer students in the right direction and help them select the best summer experience,” they said.
Fourth Year Electives Task Force
Amy Blue, William Turner, Jerry Ondo, Dennis Cope, Mark Lyles, Joseph
Gangemi, Rick Guobitis, Candace Gillespie
Student Representatives Suzanne Quattlebaum, Suhas Pai, Jesse Roach
Poster session has patient focus
It could've been a poster session at any scientific meeting. Instead, this gathering of posters, students and faculty was a key part of the first-year Medical Neuroscience course.Each year, Henry Martin, Ph.D., requires his students to choose a neuorological disease to investigate. Instead of reporting their findings in the form of a research paper, students, divided into groups of five or six, prepare a poster presentation.
Not only do they learn about brain diseases and disorders, students get practice translating their knowledge into terms a patient and his or her family can understand. First, students prepare a patient scenario complete with symptoms, history, physical examination findings and lab reports that typify the disease or disorder. Then they must show how they would explain to the patient and/or patient's family what is happening to the normal structure and function of the brain as a result, the patient's prognosis for recovery or progression and how treatment is intended to restore function.
At the end of the semester, the students present their work at an afternoon poster session. All College of Medicine faculty are invited to attend.
“Writing a paper, students learned a lot about what they wrote about,” Martin said. “The poster session allows them to learn from one another.”
Students have been very positive about the project'.s orientation to the patient.
“Students have commented, ‘It's important for me to think this way, I'll be doing this for the rest of my career,’” Martin said. “At the same time, however, they found it was harder than they thought to determine how to balance technical information with lay terminology.”
Martin has presented the poster project concept at the national meeting
of the Society for Neuroscience and the American Association of Medical
Colleges Southeastern Education Conference.
Partnership to improve health care outcomes
A newly proposed partnership between federal peer-review organizations and academic continuing medical education aims to enhance physician performance and improve health care outcomes.The collaboration stems from the Changing Physician Behavior workshop, an effort initiated by the College of Medicine Office of Continuing Medical Education (CME) and funded by the Agency for Health Care Research and Quality (formerly the Agency for Health Care Policy and Research). Medical directors from peer-review organizations (PRO) nationwide and members of the Society of Academic Continuing Medical Education (SACME) attended the workshop held in conjunction with American Health Quality Association prior to their Technical Conference this February.
“Improving quality health care indicators is a mission task critical to the peer review organizations and one in which physicians are an essential component,” said Jan Temple, Ph.D., CME director of professional development. “CME that enhances knowledge and performance is needed to help physicians remain current in a rapidly changing technological and medical science profession.”
Peer-review organizations are employed by the Health Care Financing Administration to oversee quality improvement for Medicare, and ensure quality indicators are being adhered to.
“CME and PROs have not had a strong history of working together,” Temple said. “It's critical for us to look at ways we can partner as we move forward.”
“CME needs to advance the translation of research into clinical practice and the PRO community is a valued partner in this task,” she continued.
The workshop resulted in a laundry list of potential areas for collaboration. The next step, Temple said, is to develop ways to put those efforts into action.
In South Carolina, the MUSC Office of CME is already partnering with the PRO community. These partnerships could potentially serve as model for future joint efforts on a national level, Temple said.
Nationally, the Society of Academic Continuing Medical Education and the PRO community are outling a plan of action to enhance collaboration. Temple will serve as a SACME representative in that effort.
At the recent CME World Congress, Temple received a Specil Recognition
Award from the Society of Academic Continuing Medical Education acknowledging
her efforts to bring about CME and PRO collaboration.
Don't miss this
Don't miss the following opportunity to share your medical education innovations:June 2
Submission deadline for Innovations in Medical Education (IME) Exhibits
Information and forms are available online at <http://www.aamc.org/meetings/annual/2000/exhibits/start.htm>.
Graduate Medical Eduction
Core Curriculum Lecture SeriesDinner is provided at Thursday sessions; lunch is provided at Friday sessions.
June
8
Noon - 3 p.m.
Professionalism
Thomas Gordon, Ph.D., Stephen McLeod-Bryant, M.D., and Michael Vanderhorst
2 West Amphitheater
8
4 - 7 p.m.
How to Deal with Job Recruiters
Lee Brown, president,
Caduceus Placement Services Inc.
2 West Amphitheater
9
Noon - 3 p.m.
How to Deal with Job Recruiters
See June 8 program for speaker
2 West Amphitheater
Preregistration is required. Call Angela Ybarra at 792-0761 or Sandra Murrow at 792-2575.
Continuing Medical Education
The following conferences are sponsored by MUSC. All conferences are to be held in Charleston unless otherwise noted.June
1 - 3
Update in Psychiatry
MUSC Campus
12 - 17
Intensive Review of Family Medicine
Kiawah Island Resort
23 - 24
Endoscopic Ultrasonography Tutorial
MUSC Campus
July
13 - 14
Advanced ERCP Tutorials
MUSC Campus
September
7 - 9
Ophthalmology Update 2000
Kiawah Island Resort
15 - 16
Issues in Medical Ethics—Thomas A. Pitts Lectureship
Gazes Auditorium
25 - 30
Intensive Review of Emergency Medicine
Embassy Suites—Convention Center
28 - 29
6th Annual Diabetes Symposium
Charleston Sheraton—North Charleston (formerly the Hilton)
Call the Office of Continuing Medical Education at 876-1925 for more
information.
Teaching Tips
From “Creative Medical Teaching,” Neal Whitman, 1990:Ways in which lectures commonly waver and could improve:
DON'T BE COMPLETE—Give them rules, a few pearls that will make the lecture both memorable and applicable…Only a good teacher can exclude the chaff and, relying on experience the audience may lack, point out not all that is possible, but rather what is probable and practical.
DON'T MENTION ANYTHING ONCE—Tell them what you're going to say, say it, and tell them what you said…That which you reiterate educates.
DON'T RESTATE, CREATE— Too often the lecture resembles a talking review article. It's as if the listeners were a jury to be convinced rather than an audience to be educated, and yes, entertained.
DON'T BE DEMOCRATIC— Lecture requires leadership… Just as committee meetings deteriorate without an agenda, so too lectures require a format and a speaker at the center stage.
The Medical Educator is written by Kristen
D. Karig, Public Relations