One medical school's effort to ready the workforce for the future: preparing medical students to care for populations who are publicly insured.

Full Abstract

This article describes the development, implementation, and evaluation of a curriculum project designed to prepare medical students to care for populations who have Medicaid or a low socioeconomic status (SES). The setting for the project was a community-based medical school, the College of Human Medicine (CHM) at Michigan State University. This article describes a four-year process of curriculum development and offers examples of specific changes that CHM made to courses and clerkships. CHM modified 25% of preclinical courses, five core clerkships of year three, and two clerkships (Senior Surgery and Senior Internal Medicine) of year four. The authors describe highlights of outcomes in student performance, course and clerkship ratings, attitudes, professional goals, student self-assessment of their skills, and feedback from residency program directors. The authors identified four items on the Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC) Graduation Questionnaire as related to the project and tracked them as an outcome measure of student attitudes related to the social responsibility of physicians. Attitudes of the students who experienced the modified curriculum showed greater agreement with AAMC Graduation Questionnaire items than the previous class at CHM and than their classmates across the country. The majority of residency program directors rated CHM graduates as more skilled than their peers in applying cultural competence, working with patients who have Medicaid or a low SES, and using community resources. The authors discuss factors that contributed to the successful implementation of curricular changes as well as challenges to their implementation.

Learn Faster Today Improve your study skills

Author information

Author/s: Turner, Jane L (JL); Farquhar, Lynda (L);

Affiliation: Department of Pediatrics and Human Development, College of Human Medicine, Michigan State University, East Lansing, Michigan 48824, USA. Jane.Turner(-atsign-)chm.msu.edu

Journal and publication information

Publication Type: Journal Article

Journal: Academic medicine : journal of the Association of American Medical Colleges (Acad Med), published in United States. (Language: eng)

Reference: 2008-Jul; vol 83 (issue 7) : pp 632-8

Dates: Created 2008/06/26; Completed 2008/07/22;

PMID: 18580078, status: MEDLINE (last retrieval date: 11/6/2008)

Sourced from the National Library of Medicine. Abstract text and other information may be subject to copyright.

External Links for this article (including full text providers, if available):

Click Electronic Full-text Provider Links to see options for finding the electronic full text links to this article. Note there may be a subscription or fee required for access to the full text. See our FAQ for information on finding FREE full text articles.

This article may also be located in paper journal collections available in many libraries. Use the Journal and Publication Information above to find the full article.

MeSH headings (categories)

This article was linked to the MESH Headings shown below.

Curriculum
Education, Medical, Graduate - standards
Education, Medical, Undergraduate - standards
Government Programs
Health Services Accessibility
Humans
Michigan

These are the highest related articles currently in the database:

See 100+ related articles.