So at SUNY Downstate, we have a course called Essentials of Clinical Medicine (ECM) that basically focuses on the social aspects of being a good physician. That includes developing good communication and the ability to respond correctly to a patient's culture, values, race, ethnicity, and anything else that makes the patient unique. It's also the course that teaches us how to take a patient's social history: age, where they live, career, financial status, insurance status, relationships, religion, diet, etc. Over the past weeks, we've had small group discussions in which we discussed our own experiences with our doctors and what we liked and didn't like. We also discussed different ethically challenging scenarios.
Recently, we've gotten into doing standardized patient (SP) interviews. For those unfamiliar with SPs, they are actors who are specially trained in acting as patients, sometimes as a patient with nothing out of the ordinary, but also sometimes as patients with a deep and complicated story and personality. For our ECM small groups, each of us have taken turns being the medical student interviewing and SP to acquire a brief patient social profile. One student sits in a chair facing the SP sitting across from him while the rest of the small group sits at a distance to observe. This setup is definitely very artificial, but it is a safe place to at least go through once the motions of talking to a patient and getting peer feedback!
Showing posts with label education. Show all posts
Showing posts with label education. Show all posts
Why I decided to start this blog
I decided to blog about my medical education career in light of being a Christian. I’ve been asked numerous times by both guys and girls about whether or not it’s a good decision to go into medicine. Also, as a medical student now, I come across decisions every day that I need to either make now or think and pray about for the future. And with these decisions, I need to constantly make sure that I thinking clearly about them through the lens that is scripture.
With that, I hope that sharing some of my daily thoughts and experiences can be helpful to anyone who is either considering pursuing a medical career or is currently in school for a healthcare related career and is interested in my thoughts as a Christian medical student.
It is not only through my future career as a doctor that I must use for God’s glory, but also each and every day that I spend pursuing that career.
“Come now, you who say, ‘Today or tomorrow we will go to such and such a city, and spend a year there and engage in business and make a profit.’ Yet you do not know what your life will be like tomorrow. You are just a vapor that appears for a little while and then vanishes away. Instead, you ought to say, ‘If the Lord wills, we will live and also do this or that.’” -James 4:13-15
