half-baked idea - New M1/M2 class: Patient Care Technician

Brian Still, Jordan Shealy, Kaleb Keyserling

Thanks to Brian Still, Jordan Shealy, and Kaleb Keyserling for helping me with this post. Brian worked as a Patient Care Tech, Jordan was an Anesthesia Tech, and Kaleb was a nursing assistant.

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Here's one of my frustrations about med school.  We came here because we wanted to help people. Specifically, sick people. So we spent four years of undergraduate lives putting up with insane BS to get here. Now that we've arrived, we put up with more BS. We have to spend our time on pretend patient write ups, study endless details about mechanisms of drugs that aren't even used in clinics. What if we had a chance to actually do something useful.. AND learn something? 

We have a class called Fundamentals of Patient Care - where we learn things like measuring blood pressure, follow around nurses to learn about what non-doctors do as a part of the medical team, generally learn about non-classroom things. Except the problem is - we do it in a classroom. Are you sitting? Good, because I'm about to drop a ground breaking idea on you - what if we learned non-classroom things, not in a classroom?

Hear me out. Let's bring pre-M1's to campus 8 weeks earlier and put them through a combined orientation/PCT training. It'd be a great time to bond with classmates without the awkwardness of orientation, and it'd be exposure to the clinic. Then, after those 8 weeks the M1's would be certified to be patient care tech's at hospitals.

On top of that M2's would arrive early to do the M1 training. This would double as M2-to-M1 mentoring, but also provide clinically relevant summer jobs for M2's to pad their resume's. Everyone wins.  

sidenote - at USC Greenville they have a similar program where M1's arrive early to become EMT's. This idea ALREADY exists. If MUSC is truly the flagship South Carolina med school, it has to get on board with the shift of med school education to clinical training.

Here's the part that might be unpopular.. we'd put M1's and M2's on a monthly shift at the hospital 7 PM to 7 AM shift.  Would it be a lot of work?  Yes, but we could replace many things. Hospital visits would be out, so that's 4 hrs per 6 wks. Small group would be gone - 3 hrs per week. We could also get rid of classes where we learn how to talk to patients, learn to deal with minority groups, understand healthcare disparities, etc. Plus the senior mentor program because we'd be seeing elderly patients every shift. That's probably 4 hrs per 6 wks, which adds up to 17 hrs per month. You would actually be saving time, plus making yourself useful during your pre-clinical years. 

sidenote - Isn't there also some valuable to starting from the bottom of the totem pole?  Shouldn't future leaders of healthcare teams have to understand the jobs of the techs? Shaving a patients private areas, measuring blood glucose, putting cushions under comatose patients to prevent sores. 

This would also give med students a greater appreciation for vital signs, which are interestingly enough, called vital signs because they are vital.  If we could make diagnoses and understand physiology better from a vital sign perspective, it would pay dividends for saving money on excessive diagnostic tests. 

This would also improve interprofessional communication because med students that went through this program would have better relationships with nurses.

EVERYONE WINS.

And to pile it on, what about the Malcolm Gladwell Outliers 10,000 hr theory - we need 10,000 hours of doing anything before we can truly become great at it?  Shouldn't we be devoting as much time as possible to hit that 10,000 hrs of patient care time as soon as we can? The answer is yes, as future doctors we should be investing our energy in becoming good future doctors.

See you on the other side,

from ken

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