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Thirty-five congressional staffers attended an AAMC Project Medical Education lunch seminar on Capitol Hill on October 20. The "Innovations in Medical Education" program featured three interactive sessions and highlighted just a few of the many inventive ways in which medical students and residents are being trained today.
While a typical Project Medical Education (PME) program usually invites policymakers and their staff to attend a day or day and one-half program onsite at medical schools and teaching hospitals across the country, this PME initiative brought some of the innovative features of the PME model to Washington, DC. In a typical on-site PME program, participants experience the medical education process through the roles of medical student, resident and faculty physician in order to gain a better understanding of the important missions of medical schools and teaching hospitals. Similarly, this seminar allowed participants to experience medical education first-hand.
The three seminar presenters provided the congressional staff with a better idea of how medical education is often distinctly different from the traditional educational process where lecture, not practice, is frequently the norm. Designed to educate the staff members about the process of medical education, these presentations illustrated that the training of tomorrow's doctors requires an environment where students and residents can learn about new procedures, new technology, new diseases, and new ways of caring for patients without practicing on actual patients.
In the first of the three sessions, Dr. Jeffrey Taekman, Assistant Dean for Educational Technology and Assistant Professor of Anesthesiology at Duke University School of Medicine, discussed the use of simulation with sophisticated, computerized mannequins in the medical education process. Using a patient simulator provided by Medical Education Technology, Incorporated, and with two congressional staff members serving as "residents in training," Dr. Taekman demonstrated how the simulator can effectively replicate symptoms, reactions, and real-time trauma situations.
Drs. Ron Atlas, Paul McKinney and Gina Wesley, of the University of Louisville Center for the Deterrence of Biowarfare and Bioterrorism, explained how the Center is using standardized patients to create realistic scenarios involving the clinical presentation of infection with biothreat agents or rarely seen diseases such as smallpox, anthrax, and ebola to educate future physicians to diagnose these rare diseases. With the assistance of Michelle Thompson and specially trained standardized patient actors, the University of Louisville utilizes make-up and moulage (a reproduction of a skin lesion, tumor, or other pathologic state) to depict symptoms associated with these diseases.
In the final presentation, several congressional staffers participated in an exercise conducted by Dr. James Pacala, Associate Professor of Family Practice at the University of Minnesota Medical School. In a role-playing exercise called "The Aging Game," staff members used a number of adaptive devices to simulate some of the physical limitations associated with the elderly. Using goggles, earplugs, and braces, the participating staff members experienced the same exercise that more than 1500 medical students have undergone for the purpose of learning about medical care from the perspective of an elderly patient with disabilities.
A number of the luncheon participants had previously attended one of the forty Project Medical Education programs offered in the past four years across the country. Other staff in attendance expressed their desire to attend an upcoming PME program as well as future programs on Capitol Hill.
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