See attached schedule for all lectures, small groups, seminars, field trips, and physical diagnosis sessions.
MPS I Schedule
See attached syllabus for all course information.
MPS I Syllabus
Please download Adobe Acrobat to view the PDF file.
The course will be held one day a week (one morning session and one afternoon session). In the morning you will usually attend a large group session and participate in a small group (skills group/seminar). In the afternoon you will go to a doctor's office for the office preceptor session. The course will be held while the Medical College is in session, as per the course schedule.
Large Group Sessions
Large group sessions include lectures, interviews with patients, physician panels, video clips, and role plays. They begin promptly at 8AM in Weill Auditorium. Any changes will be announced and/or e-mailed to you. You are expected to dress professionally and wear your white coat as you would for any clinical experience.
Skills Groups/Seminars
The skills groups serve as a laboratory to learn and practice your clinical skills and as a forum to reflect upon your office preceptor experiences. You will be divided into groups and will be supervised by a faculty member, the skills group facilitator. Seminars will also be held in Biostats/Epi, EBM and Nutrition modules.
Skills group will begin with a debrief of the office preceptor session in which you will be expected to report on your experience from the previous week. This discussion is designed to be brief but to allow your group to hear about the variety of experiences that are encountered in different office settings. In these debriefs, it is important not to be overly judgmental of your office preceptor. Rather, we hope that you can appreciate the wide range of interactions that occur in clinical medicine, see how some approaches work for certain individuals, and use the literature on patient-physician interactions and medical ethics to your advantage as you develop your own clinical style. The skills groups are also designed to help you see the relevance and application of the reading materials to clinical medicine. The facilitators will provide a stimulating yet comfortable learning climate that will allow you the opportunity to express your opinions, back them up with literature, and problem solve in areas of uncertainty. As a professional, you will need to develop the ability to weigh competing factors, consider all sides respectfully, and support your decisions based on accepted principles. You will also need to be able to hear others' ideas, interact with those ideas respectfully, raise additional ideas, and try to reach some consensus. Thus, your active participation in MPS sessions is essential, as is your ability to hear other views and incorporate them into your discussions.
Finally, you will have the opportunity to practice your clinical skills in interviewing and patient counseling. This will allow you to develop interviewing skills in preparation for your office preceptor sessions.
Office Preceptor Sessions
This is an exciting opportunity to see clinical practice in action and to use your new clinical skills. It is also a chance to observe and discuss topics from the morning sessions. Each scheduled afternoon, you will go to the office of your assigned office preceptor. The session should begin with a discussion of the weekly clinical assignment with your preceptor, usually some aspect of the patient interview. You will then observe your preceptor’s interactions with patients and staff and you will interview patients selected by your preceptor. The nature of these interviews will in part be negotiated by you, your preceptor and the patient, however, they should include the weekly clinical assignment. You may be able to work with the patients while they are waiting to be seen by the preceptor or after they have been seen. These details will be handled at the preceptor's office.
The flow of the office will continue as usual in most circumstances. We ask that you make every attempt to fit in to the schedule of the office activities. Occasionally, an office may be set up in a way that makes it difficult to carry out the exercise exactly as outlined. Also, emergencies may occur that interrupt the normal flow of patient care. In these circumstances, flexibility is the rule: try to fit in, find an opportunity to speak with patients or find a way to be helpful to the doctor. No matter what happens, it is likely you will learn something interesting, unexpected, and useful for the future. You will also be learning about the patient-physician interaction in the Skills Groups at Weill. Remember that this literature is relatively recent, and your particular office preceptor may not have had formal training in these areas. Nevertheless, try to appreciate how your office preceptor accomplishes his/her daily activities, note the skills that they use well, and learn as much as you can from observing the physician-patient interaction.
The reality of clinical practice is that it is usually a busy activity. Teaching students in the office setting always results in decreased clinical productivity for the office physician. The physicians participating in this course have been extremely generous with their clinical time in giving you this educational experience. In part as an expression of gratitude for their generosity, but also to foster a more collegial relationship between you and the physician, this course has as a part of its structure the concept of the Educational Partnership. The specific tasks or duties of the partnership are negotiated by the physician and his/her student. The idea of the partnership is that the student, in exchange for being able to work with the physicians' patient population in his/her office, can find a way to be helpful to the physician. There are a variety of kinds of office activities that can be helpful and educational (helping with office functions, phone call reminders to patients, taking patient weights, etc.) and there may be other kinds of activities that are suitable as well (helping the office preceptor with literature searches on topics of interest, providing copies of some of your bibliographic references). We expect that the partnership experiences will vary greatly and we look forward to seeing what kinds of activities you and your office practitioner negotiate.
We will ask you to document your office preceptorship experience in the Clinical Record.
Each week you will be asked to document some aspect of the office preceptor assignment in your Clinical Record. In this way, you will be developing not only your interviewing skills, but also your skills of medical documentation. Each entry in the Clinical Record should be signed by you and cosigned by your preceptor just as your notes in patients’ charts will be signed and cosigned in the future.
We will also ask you to document your reflections on your office preceptor experience. These entries may be as short as a paragraph and should reflect some topic pertinent to the week’s discussion. You do not need to share these with your office preceptor, but they will be useful for discussion in your Skills Groups. In fact, you will each be asked to present an entry for discussion with your group. We will also ask you to submit one longer narrative to us towards the end of the course. You will be given a choice of possible topics and specific instructions on this assignment.
