Medical students cram a lot of basic science and medicine into their first two years of training. But most learn next to nothing about the intricacies of the health care system they will soon enter.
That's something the medical school at George Washington University in Washington, D.C., is trying to remedy.
"Clinicians today have to graduate being great providers of individual care," says Dr. Lawrence Deyton, the senior associate dean who's spearheading the new curriculum. "But they also have to recognize and be able to act on the fact that their patients, when they leave the clinic or leave the hospital, are going home [and] living in situations where there are all kinds of factors that promote and perpetuate chronic disease."
The idea behind the new curriculum is to more closely link medicine with the policy and public health issues that directly affect it. So after learning about the lungs and pulmonary system, for example, the students do a project on controlling childhood asthma.
[For more of this story, written by Julie Rovner, go to http://www.npr.org/sections/he...along-with-the-pills]
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