They actually talk to a lot of patients in this course. Those are the sessions that they really enjoy the most, where they actually get a chance to ask the patient questions. A patient may talk to them about what is important to them, and about some of the experiences that they’ ve had. They have to work in the community to solve some of the problems to do the task in the rotation block. They get to see the community as a resource. And I think that perspective is very important because especially in underserved communities, you kind of see patients as having a lot of problems, and you don’ t usually see the assets are the strengths. And so by having them to have this different interaction with patients and community members, our thoughts are that that’ s going to change how they approach their individual patients as they go through residency.
What are the interdisciplinary learning features that we have referenced? What are some of the characteristics? Obviously, Family Medicine, Internal Medicine, Psychiatry, you’ re all engaged. How do these interdisciplinary activities benefit residents in working together?
Residents talk to their peers who have a different perspective. A family doctor, a psychiatrist, and an internist are going to all approach the same problem differently, because of your orientation that comes from the specialty that you’ re about to enter. By each of those residents learning about the others’ experience to solve a common problem, they will be exposed to a good understanding of that discipline, and that other person’ s perspective that they bring to the patient care delivery.
That’ s how they do a research project about community health needs and learn how to solve them. They do a community mapping exercise where they go to different towns, and they figure out where they need to actually go to implement healthy eating, taking their medicine and where to get counseling. They go and see, asking“ Where do I do that in South LA?” Within the interdisciplinary team, they have opportunities to discuss the different topics that they hear about in the session, so they get to hear different people’ s takes on it. That gives them a different perspective of disciplines, and how different disciplines think about common problems.
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They do a community mapping exercise where they go to different towns, and they figure out where they need to actually go to implement healthy eating, taking their medicine and where to get counseling.
How can this program serve as a national model?
We are continuing to refine our curriculum. Universities interested in our program can replicate our process and replace the CDU content with their own local content. I think it’ s applicable to any community that you’ re in to know more about it before you start taking care of people in that community. I think that’ s how we could look to spread it out. And a lot of the sessions are delivered via Blackboard, the learning management system. And though we had to do that because of the pandemic, I see a lot of utility and maintaining some of that in that platform, so that may be another opportunity to share it outside of our community, since people will present part of it online.
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CDU College of Medicine | PG. 29