Medicine and Society: An Innovative Approach to Training 21st Century Doctors
Dr. Alexander Amon Rodgers, Dr. Sheba George
The new 4-year MD program offers students and faculty a variety of ways to explore how students become fully immersed in a well-developed training curriculum designed for aspiring 21st Century doctors. Medicine and Society is one of the courses with a unique impact on how medical students become acquainted with the unique challenges of working within a community with glaring health care disparities such as SPA 6, while developing the requisite technical skills offered at a research-based medical training institution.
Medicine and Society, led by course directors Dr. Sheba George and Dr. Alexander Amon Rodgers, is a longitudinal course, meaning that it will continue to be taught as a companion to students’ preparation for clinical studies during the first eighteen months of training. The directors lead a group of faculty facilitators, mentors, and course coordinators, who meet with students weekly to flesh out assignments and oversee the group work. A broad variety of presenters, including Founding Dean Deborah Prothrow-Stith, Senior Associate Dean for Medical Education Dr. Arthur Gomez, CDU senior faculty, and other noted scholars are regular guest lecturers.
According to Dr. George,“ The premise for this course is that we need a broader way in medical education to teach how the“ social” and society shape and impact medical practice and medical outcomes, particularly in the context of addressing health inequities. To train a new generation of physicians with the appropriate cultural and structural competencies to effectively address the needs of multicultural patients facing health inequities, we focus on the following course objectives:
• Objective 1: Explain the legacy of structural racism in medicine and identify different levels of its operation as it affects the experience and provision of healthcare.
• Objective 2: Examine how the social determinants of health, informed by intersectional perspectives( i. e., race / ethnicity, class, gender, sexuality etc.), shape and impact health inequities at the individual and population levels.
• Objective 3: Explain the roles of health policy and public health in shaping disease prevention and health care delivery systems at local, regional, national and global levels.
• Objective 4: Demonstrate self-awareness, cultural humility and professionalism by applying the basic tenets of evidence based and ethical reasoning in the care of diverse patients and in the engagement of community stakeholders.
The course itself is not a new concept. Doctoring is a course originally developed by Michael Wilkes, MD, PhD in 1992 as a three-year overarching longitudinal curriculum. It is taught locally at UCLA’ s David Geffen School of Medicine, and at UC Davis. The goal of Doctoring is to ensure competencies in areas that allow MD graduates to care for patients, families, and communities in a compassionate, humanistic, and competent manner. Dr. Wilkes is Professor of Medicine at UC Davis. He previously served as Vice Dean and is now Director of Global Health at the UC Davis School of Medicine.
The difference-maker in the CDU model is the incorporation of the University’ s core values embodied in the CDU Advantage. This, arguably, is the key driving impulse of the Medicine and Society training approach. The environment of SPA 6, along with the
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