Medical school faculty members recognize that, as the health care delivery system changes, curricula must incorporate new classes and hands-on experiences to create future leaders in medicine. Find out what several schools are doing to better prepare the next generation of physician leaders.
These leadership curriculum changes are part of the schools’ work with the AMA’s Accelerating Change in Medical Education Consortium. The consortium is working to modernize and reshape the way physicians are trained. It brings schools together to share ideas and experiences with new programs designed to improve competency, leadership and patient care.
Building leaders in Chicago
The University of Chicago Pritzker School of Medicine will teach students about the value of care, improvement science, safety of patients and team training (a program they abbreviate as “VISTA”) to help shape physician leaders. It also is implementing a four-step strategy to create a learning environment that transforms medical students into frontline advocates for a better health care system, including creating a sense of urgency and building a guiding coalition.
VISTA students will be able to actively participate and lead patient safety and quality activities rather than just observe them, said Vineet Arora, MD, assistant dean for Scholarship and Discovery at Pritzker School of Medicine. Also, she said “we need to have graduating students who are equipped to not only provide the best care but also the highest value care. This is a critical skill we hope VISTA students will carry with them to residency.”
Jeanne Farnan, MD, assistant dean for Curricular Development and Evaluation at Pritzker, said it also will be critical for physician leaders to function as part of a team because health care delivery is now more than ever a “team sport.”
“VISTA prepares students for that through earlier immersive exposure to health care team members in the health care delivery system as well as through a greater emphasis on team communication and function and vulnerable points in a patient’s passage through the health care system, such as care transitions,” Dr. Farnan said.
Individual leadership paths in Texas
At Dell Medical School at the University of Texas at Austin, all students will go through a core leadership curriculum but will have the opportunity to pursue an individual leadership path that allows them to explore areas that they are interested in during medical school.
“The competencies needed now for physicians are different than when we went to medical school. It is more about leading a team and working on a team, advocacy and person-centered care,” said Susan “Sue” Cox, MD, executive vice dean for Academics and chair of Medical Education for Dell Medical School.
In their third year, students will be able to pursue distinctions in health care redesign, population health and basic science/translational research and dual degrees with a focus on leading change in an area in which they are interested. For example, a student or team of students can carry out a population health study on diabetes in a particular zip code or help improve health care in a clinic setting.
“Physicians will not just be leaders in coordinating health care in the clinical setting, but they will be leaders in the community in general,” said executive coach and leadership expert Eddie Erlandson, MD, leadership advisor for Dell Medical School.
Community leaders in Atlanta
Morehouse School of Medicine in Atlanta is increasing its ongoing efforts to recruit medical students from underserved urban and rural populations and will provide those students with learning communities that begin on the first day of medical school. Students will take an interactive, learner-centered approach to engage in building teamwork, communication and professionalism skills.
For the past 20 years, Morehouse medical students have been part of a yearlong service learning course in which they work with a community site to assess needs and develop, implement and evaluate an intervention. Morehouse in its application to the consortium said the school is expanding this effort and creating a program that keeps students “longitudinally linked to their communities for ongoing collaboration in addressing the health and well-being of these communities.”
“The goals of our revised curriculum support our mission of helping lessen the physician shortage that exists, especially in the area of primary care, and to help train physicians, especially physicians of color, who will choose to serve in medically underserved urban and rural communities,” said associate professor of clinical obstetrics and gynecology Ngozi F. Anachebe, Pharm.D, MD, Morehouse’s associate dean of undergraduate medical education and associate dean of admissions and student affairs.
A major focus of the revised curriculum is enhanced self-directed learning, Dr. Anachebe said. The goal is for students to take ownership of their learning with academic portfolios and personal development planning.
“Our hope is for students to continue regular self-assessment and to continually seek out resources for this continuous self-improvement and learning,” she said. “The doctors of tomorrow must take advantage of the information explosion that is occurring to stay in the forefront of medicine.”
Patient safety leaders in Michigan
The goal of curriculum changes at Michigan State University College of Osteopathic Medicine is to give medical students the skills they need to become leaders in patient safety by being able to identify safety concerns and find solutions to make the situation better.
Students need a specific curriculum that gives them the opportunity to practice the skills associated with patient safety in clinical settings where they learn, said Saroj Misra, DO, associate professor of family and community medicine at Michigan State University College of Osteopathic Medicine.
“It is our belief that our approach to this curriculum will create a student who is better versed in the basic tenets of patient safety so that they can make meaningful contributions to the systems they learn in and feel confident that they are giving back to those systems that train them,” Dr. Misra said.
Consortium schools are also changing other ways medical school students learn, including paving new paths to residency, relaying student competency to residency programs and training students for rural medicine. You also can read about what students at the forefront of transforming med ed have to say about their experiences.
