The “structure” of the medical school of the future

With the advent of dramatic changes in how medicine is taught —from active learning to interprofessional education—medical schools are now rethinking the design of their buildings and classrooms as well. Learn how the University of North Dakota (UND) approached building the medical school of the future for its new School of Medicine& Health Sciences (SMHS), completed this summer. UND SMHS started its patient-centered learning curriculum nearly 20 years ago. The school has had a required course in interprofessional education (IPE) since 2006, and in 2012 it added team-based learning to the curriculum.“As a school of health sciences, we have nine programs, and we are by our nature interprofessional,” said Gwen Halaas, MD, MBA, senior associate dean for education at UND SMHS, at a recent meeting of the AMA’sAccelerating Change in Medical Education Consortium in Chicago. “We believe that is the way to address some of the efficiency and quality issues in health care.”So faculty and administrators at UND SMHS have been working to create more interprofessional learning experiences.“Medical schools have had learning communities for a long time, but our interprofessional learning communities are designed to change the culture to support IPE and collaboration,” Halaas said. “And I think by having students learn and socialize together throughout their entire programs, they will be much more apt to … collaborate with and respect each other and communicate easily....
Source: AMA Wire - Category: Journals (General) Authors: Source Type: news