Improved patient experience, population health, and reduced cost of care for patients with obesity and other chronic diseases will not be achieved by clinical interventions alone. We offer here a new iteration of the Chronic Care Model that integrates clinical and community systems to address chronic diseases. Obesity contributes substantially to cardiovascular disease, type 2 diabetes mellitus, and cancer. Dietary and physical activity interventions will prevent, mitigate, and treat obesity and its related diseases. Challenges with the implementation of this model include provider training, the need to provide incentives for health systems to move beyond clinical care to link with community systems, and addressing the multiple elements necessary for integration within clinical care and with social systems. The Affordable Care Act, with its emphasis on prevention and new systems for care delivery, provides support for innovative strategies such as those proposed here.
The ward round is the bread and butter of internal medicine. It forms the basis of clinical decision making and reviewing patients' progress. It is fundamental to the role of the internal medical physician. It allows for the review of the patients' notes, signs and symptoms, physiological parameters and investigation results. Most importantly, it allows for an interaction with the patient and their relatives and is a means of relating medical information back, answer queries and plan future medical management strategies. These should be integrated into the teaching round by a senior clinician so that time away from the bedside is also used to enhance the teaching and learning experience. Here, I would like to draw on my experience as a learner as well as an educator, together with the available literature, to draw up a simple 12-step teaching strategy that should help the ward round serve the dual purpose of teaching medical students and junior doctors.
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