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Our first order of business: primary care
Short White Coat is a blog about learning to be a doctor.
Posts appear here as part of White Coat Notes. Ishani Ganguli is a fourth-year
Harvard medical student. E-mail her at shortwhitecoat@gmail.com.
Last
night, primary care got its 15 (plus) minutes of local fame when Harvard Medical School held a town hall meeting on the topic. Dean Jeffrey S. Flier had formed an advisory group in October to evaluate this famously under-appreciated discipline -- in terms of education, clinical practice, and research -- and the idea was to gather ideas from the HMS community on how to establish Harvard as a leader in primary care. The first step, one of my classmates pointed out, is to learn from institutions that already are.
The audience was largely comprised of faculty and residents, with a fair number of students thrown in -- a crucial element in this sort of conversation (not that I'm biased).
Ideas flew fast and furious, with hardly a pause during the two-hour session. One proposal was that educators should define primary care earlier on in medical school, because most of us have no clue what it is until we've already latched ourselves onto more specialized fields. And we should be exposed to the field in ways that highlight its many strengths -- longitudinal relationships with patients, diagnostic mysteries, opportunities to impart social justice.
Last
night, primary care got its 15 (plus) minutes of local fame when Harvard Medical School held a town hall meeting on the topic. Dean Jeffrey S. Flier had formed an advisory group in October to evaluate this famously under-appreciated discipline -- in terms of education, clinical practice, and research -- and the idea was to gather ideas from the HMS community on how to establish Harvard as a leader in primary care. The first step, one of my classmates pointed out, is to learn from institutions that already are.The audience was largely comprised of faculty and residents, with a fair number of students thrown in -- a crucial element in this sort of conversation (not that I'm biased).
Ideas flew fast and furious, with hardly a pause during the two-hour session. One proposal was that educators should define primary care earlier on in medical school, because most of us have no clue what it is until we've already latched ourselves onto more specialized fields. And we should be exposed to the field in ways that highlight its many strengths -- longitudinal relationships with patients, diagnostic mysteries, opportunities to impart social justice.
Other suggestions centered around more financial support and interdisciplinary efforts for primary care research and clinical innovation, areas in which students could also get involved.
Then there was the medical school within a medical school concept, which was riffed on for much of the meeting. It's meant to identify primary care-minded students on entry and foster their dedication to the field. The danger here, I think, is that in the process of fully engaging a subset of students, we disengage the (many) others who aren't sure about what they want when they enter medical school. But the idea, in its several iterations, bears further discussion.
One sticking point that came up a few times was the need to demonstrate clear institutional support for primary care, a goal that was somewhat undercut by Dean Flier's absence at the meeting, a primary care doctor in the audience pointed out.
Even so, the event was less about generating new ideas than about publicly showing that primary care should be an educational, clinical, and research priority. As one meeting facilitator put it, the pendulum is swinging and the winds are shifting in favor of primary care. If I may add to the mix of movement-oriented metaphors, the meeting last night -- with its energetic crowd and flurry of discussion points -- was definitely a step in the right direction.
Then there was the medical school within a medical school concept, which was riffed on for much of the meeting. It's meant to identify primary care-minded students on entry and foster their dedication to the field. The danger here, I think, is that in the process of fully engaging a subset of students, we disengage the (many) others who aren't sure about what they want when they enter medical school. But the idea, in its several iterations, bears further discussion.
One sticking point that came up a few times was the need to demonstrate clear institutional support for primary care, a goal that was somewhat undercut by Dean Flier's absence at the meeting, a primary care doctor in the audience pointed out.
Even so, the event was less about generating new ideas than about publicly showing that primary care should be an educational, clinical, and research priority. As one meeting facilitator put it, the pendulum is swinging and the winds are shifting in favor of primary care. If I may add to the mix of movement-oriented metaphors, the meeting last night -- with its energetic crowd and flurry of discussion points -- was definitely a step in the right direction.
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Contributors
blogger
Elizabeth Cooney is a former
health reporter for the Worcester Telegram & Gazette, where she also was a
business reporter and an editor. Earlier in her career, she edited medical
books and journals at Little, Brown, and worked for Boston magazine.Boston Globe Health and Science staff:
- Gideon Gil, Health and Science Editor
- Ishani Ganguli, Short White Coat blogger
