Program helps doctors-in-training
focus on patients
by Holly
AuerOf The Post and Courier Staff
When Barclay Stewart went home to Beaufort this Christmas after his first semester of medical school, he looked over his family and friends in terms of the anatomy lessons he’d spent the previous months cramming into his brain.
“I saw them as their organs,” he said. “Not as people.”
It’s an occupational hazard for students learning to be doctors who spend most of their first two years of medical school wading through a whirl of biochemistry, metabolic processes and histology, the study of microscopic cells and tissues. The curriculum reduces their future patients to their smallest parts, so students say it’s easy to lose sight of how all the pieces come together to make a living, breathing, feeling human being.
A new program at the Medical University of South Carolina gives new medical students an extra chance to pull their noses out of the books, or step out of the gross anatomy lab, and interact with patients.
First-year medical
students Rashim Gupta, left, and Barclay Stewart spend a lunch hour
Thursday, April 27, with 8-year-old Itiana Hutchinson in her hospital
room at MUSC Children's Hospital. Hutchinson shows off a hat she made
at the atrium in the hospital. photo by Melissa Haneline Of The Post and Courier
Every weekday around noon, a group of students head to the Children’s Hospital for the Lunch Buddies program, in which they spend mealtime eating, chatting and playing with a child or teen patient.
It’s not about medicine, per se—students can’t yet play any role in providing care—but those involved in the program say it’s nonetheless becoming a key part of their education.
Childhood innocence, as it turns out, is a great teaching tool. The kids involved in the program usually aren’t old enough to understand the subtleties of what’s wrong with them or how they’re cared for, so they communicate honestly about what they do understand: Their tricks for dealing with the pain of needle sticks, for example, or their gripes about hospital food.
It’s the patient experience uncensored by fear or politeness, and watching it unfold seems to provide an extra dose of empathy for these doctors-in-training.
“Kids have no inhibitions, so we’re really able to understand where they’re coming from,” said Stewart, who along with fellow first-year student Rashim Gupta got the Lunch Buddies program off the ground this winter. “They don’t have any of the fatalistic ideals that adults do.”
The program helps the young patients, too, by providing a diversion from IV lines, X-rays, operations and yucky-tasting medications.
“They deal with (their illness) all the rest of the time,” Gupta said. “This is their chance to be with someone who’s not going to talk to them about it.”
Instead, perhaps, they’ll play with Mr. Potato Head for an hour. On a recent afternoon that Stewart and Gupta spent with Itiana Hutchinson, a third-grader from Beaufort, she didn’t feel much like having lunch, since her mom had promised to bring her something tasty back from outside the hospital.
So rather than eating, the three chattered about their astrological signs and pawed through a big bag of Mr. Potato Head parts, paying special attention to the plastic food items. Braided bread, a hamburger, Swiss cheese—each sparked a new, meandering conversation.
Itiana frowned when she picked up a round, pinkish slab.
“Bologna,” she announced, puzzled. “What’s bologna made out of?”
“That,” Stewart said, “is a good question. Nobody really knows.”
Though they won’t be graded on this activity, it has become an important part of the med school routine for the nearly 40 students who participate. Modeled after a program, called Meal Mates, for elderly patients at a Florida hospital, students are asked to come just once per week.
Participants get help from the hospital’s volunteer office and its child life department, who figure out which patients might need or want a Lunch Buddy each day. In the future, it’s hoped that the program can expand to dinner times, too, and second-year students might also participate.
MUSC medical students are required to spend about 20 hours during their first year in a primary-care setting, where they learn to take patient histories and get a glimpse of some of the diseases they’ve studied. But signing on for extracurriculars such as Lunch Buddies or the Crisis Ministries clinic offers an extra dimension, said Amy Blue, Ph.D., the College of Medicine’s associate dean for curriculum and evaluation.
“Getting involved in service opportunities like this will help to create a well-rounded individual who will become a more balanced physician,” she said.
It stands to make a smarter doctor, too. Blue’s research, for instance, has found that students who get involved in community service might perform better during their residencies.
Editor’s note: The article ran April 29 in the Post and Courier and is reprinted with permission.
Friday, May 12, 2006
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