How Can Medical Students Add Value? Identifying Roles, Barriers, and Strategies to Advance the Value of Undergraduate Medical Education to Patient Care and the Health System

Abstract

These findings provide a starting point for collaborative work to positively impact clinical care and medical education through the enhanced integration of value-added medical student roles into care delivery systems.

Reframing Medical Education

“…6 After several other national calls for change, many schools altered the traditional framework by creating new courses and early clinical roles for students to learn about the healthcare delivery system in a more structured way. [11][12][13] The move established a third pillar of medical education: Health Systems Science (HSS), defined as the "principles, methods, and practice of improving quality, outcomes, and costs of healthcare delivery for patients and populations within systems of medical care." 13,14 This pillar involved decades of work and provides the comprehensive educational framework for competencies in inter professional collaboration, population health, clinical informatics, high-value care, and systems thinking.…”

Teaching in longitudinal integrated clerkships: the seven ‘C's

“…Students value when preceptors afford them responsibility for their patients and set high expectations for their care of patients . As students gradually integrate into the clinic and health care team, they may be given meaningful roles and assigned responsibilities so that they can add value to the clinic . Once preceptors have established a trusting relationship with students, and appropriate training on documentation and patient privacy is completed, students can be asked to call patients with laboratory or radiology results.…”

“…Longitudinal integrated clerkships, with longer time in practice settings, are well positioned to facilitate these goals. These experiences benefit students learning and practising population health, and allow them to participate as valuable members of the health care community . Whether it is running a community 5K race, volunteering alongside faculty members or staff at a soup kitchen or leading a health fair at a local school, community outreach drives important dialogue around the interplay of community resources and health outcomes.…”

“…Longitudinal integrated clerkships provide the opportunity for students to have increasing autonomy and responsibility as the year progresses. [14][15][16] At the beginning of the clerkship, and iteratively throughout, preceptors and students develop a learning plan and outline a trajectory of growth and improvement for the year. As knowledge and confidence grow, students should be given progressively more complex tasks suitable for their developing knowledge and skills.…”

“…These experiences benefit students learning and practising population health, and allow them to participate as valuable members of the health care community. 9,15 Whether it is running a community 5K race, volunteering alongside faculty members or staff at a soup kitchen or leading a health fair at a local school, community outreach drives important dialogue around the interplay of community resources and health outcomes. Community engagement and social accountability connect students to the core values of the profession and to the values that brought them into medicine in the first place.…”