Patient Partnership Program

Conceived of and developed by DMS students, the programme involves giving students the opportunity to develop one-on-one relationships with patients living in the area. Patients volunteer to spend time with medical students outside the hospital environment. These students visit the patients in their homes once each month throughout a one-year period in an effort to get to know them to a degree that would rarely be possible during visits to a hospital or medical clinic. These personal encounters are a strategy for re-making the typical dynamic of the medical encounter - so that the patient in a way becomes the educator, the one with deeper (experiential or lived) knowledge. Students listen to their patient partners discussing what it is like to live with illnesses or conditions such as diabetes, cancer, disabilities, or high-risk pregnancy. Communication is used as a tool in the effort to make medical education more meaningful and complete.

In addition to giving students the chance to be a part of patients' lives outside the medical realm, the Patient Partnership Program also aims to foster peer support among students. The 20 or so students who participate each year also have opportunities to reflect individually and as a group on their experiences. Organisers say that, at times when students' patient partners are going through painful or difficult periods, the group often calls special meetings to give that student an opportunity to talk about what's happening and to seek support. The students may read poems and brief stories aloud during these meetings, using metaphors to help explain what they are going through alongside their patients. The idea is that, when these students become practicing physicians, they might also reach out to colleagues during emotionally trying times.

As it has turned out, the programme has also functioned to support patients in various ways. The idea is that talking about one's experiences can itself be therapeutic - a source of psychosocial support. Furthermore, many students have developed close friendships with their partners, and have helped them throughout their illness by, for instance, spending time with the patient's children when he or she is too weak or ill to do so.

As of this writing, the programme is small and voluntary - it is not a required part of all DMS students' training. However, it is in its early stages of development and may expand.

Health Care, Education.

Organisers were motivated by the fact that American medical education typically enables students to interact with patients in only an episodic fashion. Rarely, they explain, do these students have a chance to see a particular patient more than once. Furthermore, medical education in the United States often stresses a narrow, scientific view of the human body and person. In the words of the medical student who first conceived of the programme, "We talk about microdetails in medical school. We talk about how fast a neuron fires, and what the half-life of insulin is. We don't talk about the half-life of a patient's experience, or the half-life of a doctor's relationship with patients. I want to teach people how to care for patients in the long-term rather than simply in acute situations. If you don't do that during the first two years, you'll never get that again."