Before long, the doctors started saying that it was fun to teach our students. Some
of them even said they wished medical school had been this way when they were
students.
The patients, too, overwhelmingly liked having the students. “They would come
in and ask: ‘Do you have a student working today?’ That question was repeated over
and over and over again,” Ocie said. “The patients saw the students as nonthreatening
in the way they listened. That was part of our method – to teach them to be
listeners and to interact with patients.”
For most of his career, Ocie had been at an academic medical center – and he
had been disappointed to see that medical students frequently became afterthoughts.
Moreover, they rarely got to encounter patients who had real-world, everyday problems
– the kinds of problems they would deal with when they went into practice. So
one of the advantages of this community-based model is that students see far more
patients than they would elsewhere. “In a more traditional medical school’s hospital
setting, they would see a couple hundred patients in a whole year if they were lucky,”
Ocie said. “Whereas our students saw hundreds of patients in a month, literally. And
those were a mixture of experiences.”
Because of the hands-on training our students had in their first two years, they
came to the regional campuses already comfortable interacting with patients. At a lot
of medical schools, students don’t get that kind of training.
“Ocie and I were walking through the halls of a hospital one day,” Mollie said,
“and the CEO stopped us and said, ‘I want you to know that I can spot an FSU student
a mile away’ – this was in Orlando, where they also had University of Central
Florida students – ‘because they look up, they speak and they get along well with the
staff.”
That didn’t happen by accident. For our community-based model, we look for
students who are comfortable with patients, are good communicators, are in medicine
for selfless reasons and will get along with nurses and a doctor’s office staff.
For all their strengths, regional campuses also posed challenges. Most important,
the education at each campus had to be consistent with the others. Sending a student
to Campus A couldn’t mean that she’d get a weaker experience in pediatrics than at
Campus B, for example. The experience had to be strong at each campus, in each
rotation. We went to great pains to guarantee consistency in quality across the board.
There were a few differences, of course, because some campuses had residency
programs. Part of our goal was trying to develop residencies as much as possible at
our campuses, because we recognize that residents are important in the education
of medical students. In a traditional medical education, they’re probably a lot more
important than the faculty.
But here’s one fact that the LCME still apparently doesn’t grasp: We didn’t have
to have residents for teaching, because in most cases our students were learning from
attending physicians rather than less-experienced residents. Still, in the fourth year
we required rotations that would expose our students to residents, so they’d be prepared
when they entered their own residencies. We had electives in anything and
everything they wanted to do.
“Our students took a more active role in directing their own education,” Ocie
said. “I would say it worked out beautifully. As we know from the feedback that we
32 | Breaking the Mold