Patient/(Student) Doctor Interaction

Aside from our traditional science classes, one of the classes we're just now starting up is "Essentials of Clinical Medicine." It's actually a pretty cool "class." Minus the required attendance, that is. Boo to that. Anyway, class in quotes because it's not one in the traditional sense of lectures and labs. There are still lectures with all ~200 of us, but they aren't as hardcore as the other science ones we have. These lectures cover somewhat interesting topics. Today's was "cultural competency and health literacy," both legitimate concerns in a city like Chicago. Looking ahead, stuff like stress in medicine, teamwork, leadership, professionalism, and patient safety are also covered. Yeah I know, I said they were *somewhat* interesting. They're good things to cover, especially since everyone lacks in one or more department. Thing is, I don't think that you can really teach people these things. It's a nice idea though, and I like that they're trying to help develop professional skills.

Another aspect of ECM is that of small groups, in which we're divided into set groups of about 12 for the entire year, with M3s and M4s leading our groups. We touch on some of the stuff covered in lectures, but with more emphasis on clinical aspects. M1 year's small group emphasis is mostly on history taking and patient interviewing. Throughout the year we'll have our groups meet to talk/learn about different aspects of history taking and the patient interview. And the nice thing is that we actually get to head out to different hospitals to work on our this stuff, in addition to "learning" about it.

Along with the small group history and interview stuff, there's more clinical stuff. And I'll be honest, I'm a fan of clinical stuff. There's a few classes on taking vital signs. And even better, we get paired up with a Chicagoland primary care doctor and end up shadowing him/her throughout the year. From what I've heard, some of the cooler docs give some of their students quite a bit of latitude in clinic.

To those out there, you might be thinking "big whoop." Clinical stuff. I thought that's what med school was about. Actually for the first two years, a lot of med schools have little clinical stuff outside of extracurricular organizations (if even that). At these places it's straight up books for two years, first part of boards, and then straight into clinical rotations. I like what UIC is doing with ECM, giving us clinical experience within the M1/M2 curriculum - in addition to the numerous extracurricular opportunities. I especially like that they try and prep us for clinical rotations by teaching clinical skills the first two years (history taking M1 year, physical exam M2 year) in addition to giving us a lot of patient and doctor interactions. Again, a lot of schools don't do this. This is actually one reason that I picked UIC - they're known for producing clinically ready docs.

ECM started up last week and we got to interview our first patients as med students. I'd had decent exposure to this sort of patient interaction from my clinic job. Still, it was nice to dress up as a pseudo-doctor (white coat and all) get to actually get to talk to patients - especially for those who haven't done this sort of thing before. There was no real structure to the session - a resident and a (real) patient were up on stage and had a real medical interview for all of us to observe. We then broke down into groups, each complete with a patient to interview. It was a weird dynamic having six students interviewing one patient, but it worked out pretty well in my group. IMO, the idea of the session was to get us used to talking to patients and get us a rough idea of the types of questions to ask - because not everyone has this type of exposure. It was kinda cool seeing how different people interact with patients. Every group interviewed two patients and pretty much everyone had good things to say about the session. Our group was pretty lucky in that our patients were sociable and very unabashed in talking to six random kids about their medical problems. Both patients said they'd gladly have us as doctors. Sure I'm tooting my own horn there, but it's nice to hear that sort of thing amid all the studying.

Anyway, I head out to another free clinic this Saturday - this time up on the north side. I'm pretty excited about it, especially after my last free clinic experience. And the nice thing is that these free clinics are all through extracurricular organizations. UIC's students are amazingly good at organizing stuff like this and coordinating with other organizations/schools. I can't claim to help out, but I'm glad that these opportunities are out there. Aside from that, ECM is set to get going: vital signs, history taking, and finding out who our preceptor (shadowing doctor) all within the next few weeks. Now, if I didn't have a physio, histo, and biochem/nutrition exam all within a seven day period, things would be that much better. Ah well, comes with the territory I suppose.