Teaching Patient-Centeredness

See the Original Post on the IHI Open School Blog

...After just a few weeks of medical school, I'm already worrying about losing my ability to empathize with others and my future patients. During our first lecture, our professors told us that they were going to teach us the language of medicine. Will learning the language of medicine prevent me from speaking normally? Will I be as careless as my scoliosis doctor when speaking to my future patients?

Fortunately, the University of Michigan has a component of our curriculum to prevent this from happening. The program is called the Family Centered Experience. The first year medical students are grouped into pairs and each pair is assigned a patient and family managing at least one chronic disease. This could be a mother suffering from breast cancer, a father managing diabetes, or a grandfather suffering from a neurodegenerative disease. Throughout the year, we will be visiting our families and attending clinic visits with them in order to learn from the patient and their family what illness means and how it impacts the individual and family...