New York Times (blog) Life Sciences Dominate at Wharton Competition New York Times (blog) Stephanie Huang, a first-year medical student at the University of Pennsylvania described the device as a kind of “drywall anchor” for the spine. …

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Life Sciences Dominate at Wharton Competition – New York Times (blog)

Riverfront Times (blog) Wash U. Medical Student Wins Disgusting Tater Tot-Eating Competition Riverfront Times (blog) It was disgustingly awesome, and a Wash U

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Wash U. Medical Student Wins Disgusting Tater Tot-Eating Competition – Riverfront Times (blog)

Loyola University Medical Center ranked among the top hospitals in the world in a recent research competition for pathologists in training. Loyola was tied for the top nine programs in the number of scientific studies accepted in the Stowell-Orbison Awards competition sponsored by the United States and Canadian Academy of Pathology (USCAP). One hundred academic programs worldwide participated in the competition.

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Loyola Among World’s Top Centers In Pathology Competition

Drug competition in peril Baltimore Sun Jane Andrews is a medical student and public health student at the Johns Hopkins University and a member of Universities Allied for Essential Medicines. …

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Drug competition in peril – Baltimore Sun

- Frank W. Chen [forum discussion]

Health care education entails building the foundation of ushering in new generations of physicians and professionals to deliver quality care to patients on a global scale.  The very notion of training doctors has experienced tremendous upheaval in the history of America.  From the 1700s, medical education and licensure has undergone remarkable reform in the struggle to balance medicine as a business practice and a humanitarian pursuit.  In the early 20^th century, the Flexner report helped culminate a major upheaval to effect a radical change in perspective to bring about the professional ethic we see in the practice of medicine today.  However, one can argue that another round of reform is now in order to enable the standard of continuous quality improvement expected in a discipline grounded in utilizing best practices to help alleviate suffering and promote good health.  What type of initiative would best be put to use to fundamentally revolutionize the health care education system to empower the workforce to deliver coordinated and patient-centered medicine?  Implementing this reform must be rooted in measures that tackle performance-based goals on both an individual and system-wide level.  The most important change requires tackling this reform on both fronts simultaneously, recognizing that each goes hand in hand with the other.  Unifying these various efforts can be federally galvanized via a newly established National Health Education Reform Taskforce (NHERT), jointly governed under the Department of Health and Human Services and the Institute of Medicine.

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- Mallika Mendu [forum discussion]

Health professional schools, and medical schools in particular, aim to select candidates who are intelligent, motivated and who embody the qualities of leadership and compassion.  Matriculating students begin their careers in medicine with a passionate desire to serve and have demonstrated an ability to work effectively with others, often in a leadership role.  Medical education should be designed to foster this enthusiasm and eagerness to provide care.  However, there is evidence that medical students become more cynical over the course of their medical school education.¹ In light of the current state of our healthcare system, with over 45 million uninsured, a significant percentage of patients with numerous barriers to care, and rising medical costs often attributable to avoidable medical errors due to a lack of interdisciplinary coordination, attitudes and values among health professionals in training are of utmost importance.  The question arises as to how to capture the original motivations of health professional students and ensure that those motivations are not lost as they embark on a career in medicine.  Health professional or medical student-run clinics have been developed by students in a number of medical institutions across the country.  These clinics are often founded by a core group of motivated students interested in serving the unmet healthcare needs of an underserved population in their community.² Though the main mission of these clinics is to alleviate barriers to care for disadvantaged patients, another important goal is to offer a unique educational experience to student volunteers.  Student-run clinics offer students, at all levels of training, the opportunity to understand the challenges of managing healthcare for underserved patients with limited resources and to work closely in teams, often with health professional students in varied disciplines.  Medical schools that have implemented student-run clinic programs have observed the value of this unique educational opportunity: students are engaged in clinical care early in their medical education; they are involved in all aspects of healthcare from social services and education to primary care and specialty referrals; they are responsible for coordinating care for their patients by working in teams. As a result, students are better able to relate to their patients, often the most disadvantaged of patient populations.³ In order to create a healthcare workforce equipped to provide a high-value team approach to coordinated, patient-centered healthcare, a fundamental change required of the healthcare education system is to support and help fund health professional student-run clinic programs in all medical institutions across the country.

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- Morgan Medlock [forum discussion]

Introduction

For decades, lawmakers have pondered the prospect of sweeping health care reform in America, and the current economic crisis has intensified its importance. We can no longer endure the rising costs, declining value, and lack of coverage plaguing our health care system. At 16% of gross domestic product, U.S. health spending is double the median of other industrialized nations, yet America ranks 15th to 40th on several key health measures, ranging from life expectancy to years of life lost due to preventable causes.^1,2 The U.S. health system is not the best in quality of care, nor is it a leader in health information technology.³ Our challenges are complex, and the burden of harm is staggering.

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- Wael Salem [forum discussion]

The renaissance era of medicine is in full force and the body of knowledge is growing exponentially.  As the knowledge base balloons, the onus is on health care professionals to amass this knowledge, stay current, push forward with research and then educate the next generation.  Meanwhile the health care system in which these physicians, nurses and allied health professionals must work is evolving at an equally dizzying pace.  The medical education model at most institutions, however, has changed little to accommodate the recent changes in the biomedical sciences and even less in its attempt to make sense of the health care delivery system [1, 2].

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- Duc M. Chung [forum disccusion]

Introduction

Global-minded and culturally-sensitive communication skills are pertinent yet often overlooked components of our health care education system. Emphasis in health professional schools has been on mastery of scientific concepts via problem and system based learning, following didactical algorithms to make diagnoses. While these do provide necessary clinical skills to treat patients, of equal importance is that health care providers are aware of national health care issues and attain effective communication skills to promote healthcare prevention and continuity of care for all patients. Research from the World Health Organization indicates that although the US has the most costly healthcare system, it is the only developed nation aside from South Africa that do not provide healthcare to all of its citizens.ⁱ In fact, an estimated 42.6 million people are uninsured.ⁱⁱ These astounding statistics account for the US’s low ranks in health and well-being (it ranks 26th amongst industrialized nations in infant mortality rate) and healthcare satisfaction (only 40% of US citizens are satisfied with their healthcare system).ⁱⁱⁱ

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