Preparing Students for the Future
.jpg "Dean for Medical Education Stephen Ray Mitchell, MD, speaking at the White Coat Ceremony")
.jpg "Georgetown University medical students on the campus")
(This is part 4 of 6 of a series of articles excerpted from "A Medical Mission" in the Spring/Summer 2009 issue of Georgetown Magazine. Click here for Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3)
The Medical Center needs to be ready to train the doctors of today, as well as those 10 and 20 years from now, and academic leaders are working on changing the curriculum to reflect this. Part of this evolution includes a commitment to a more integrated curriculum – students are being exposed to interdisciplinary concepts that will begin to prepare them for a systems-based approach to science and medicine. These changes came from a curricular reform effort led by Dean for Medical Education Stephen Ray Mitchell, MD.
“There has been an exponential increase in the amount of biomedical knowledge medical students must learn,” Mitchell says. “But the way medicine has been traditionally taught – in a framework of discreet disciplines such as anatomy, pathology and microbiology – is less and less suitable for preparing the doctors of the future.”
Georgetown University School of Medicine began the process of re-engineering its curriculum five years ago to make it a more integrated and dynamic learning process. The new first-year curriculum is now in place, and the remaining program changes will unfold each successive year. Reforms include the creation of a four-year ethics curriculum, the development of an integrated longitudinal clinical problem-solving course, and the establishment of population and community health education.
Mitchell has put in place rigorous measurement and validation procedures to ensure that the changes bring actual improvements.
“We have to be sure when we tinker with the process that we don’t endanger the product,” he says. “Our students are comfortable in clinical situations, and good with patients. Our Integrative Learning Center, where they begin to practice these skills, is the model other schools are using to build their own. Each year a greater percentage of our graduates match into the nation’s top residency programs. There they compete with the best of the best. And the directors of these programs always say to us, ‘Send us more.’ ”
As a result, changes to the curriculum – to include new technology and a preventative approach – will be made with deliberate care. “We want our students to remain excited about learning medicine, so we are introducing the concept of ‘learning families’ where they form teams and look out for each other, and learn from each other and stay healthy,” Mitchell explains. “Learning to be a doctor has never been easy, and now it’s more stressful and expensive than ever. We want to do everything we can to change that for the better.”
Andrew Caruso is a recent graduate who applied for an internal medicine residency. He hopes to complete that program and then seek a cardiology fellowship.
“I think that Georgetown has taken extra care and effort in preparing us to be ethical physicians in the 21st century,” he says. “We have taken courses each year of medical school that have specifically designed components of ethical practice in them, and had extensive small group programs for debating both classic and current ethical topics during our first two years of medical school.”
He notes that Georgetown was founded on an ethical framework and that the medical school “does a commendable job in training future physicians who will continue that ethical tradition and practice. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the first act we do as Georgetown medical students is to recite the Hippocratic Oath.”
After graduation with an MD and PhD in tumor biology, Challice Bonifant (M’09, G’09) plans to begin a three-year pediatrics residency program, to be followed by a three-year oncology fellowship.
“As a student at Georgetown for the past seven years, I have been fortunate to experience incredible exposure to biomedical ethics both in the medical school and the graduate school,” she says. “Formal, small-group sessions helped to build a basic framework from which to assess and analyze real-life dilemmas, but more importantly examples set by admirable physicians and professors established a model which I hope to emulate in my own practice.”
Another important part of a student’s experience at the School of Medicine is Match Day, the day fourth-year medical students across the country find out where they will go for their residencies, which typically last three to seven years. This past year, more than 90 percent of these students were placed into one of their top three choices, and 45 percent matched into the U.S. News and World Report’s top 25 residency programs.
Nursing practices must also remain at the cutting-edge, says the Dean of the School of Nursing & Health Studies, Bette Jacobs, PhD, RN. The school has entered into a partnership with Washington Hospital Center to help address the nursing shortage locally through an accelerated second bachelor of science in nursing degree program that prepares college graduates for frontline nursing practice.
“People delivering health care need a firm grounding in genetics,” she says, “because the future of nursing will be dictated by advances in genetics and informatics. Those tools are at the nexus of science and health care delivery.”
By Frank Reider, excerpted from the Spring/Summer 2009 issue of Georgetown Magazine
