Doctor of Medicine | MD Program to their ideals when the strenuous pace of medical education — and later medical practice — can seem overwhelming. Throughout their time at Geisinger Commonwealth, through a variety of assignments and experiences, medical students are continually challenged to envision and to plan for not just what kind of doctor they want to be, but also what kind of person.
Putting the patient at the center of medicine At Geisinger Commonwealth, students spend time with real patients right away. Through our Family-Centered Experience Program, students take a break from studying anatomy, physiology and molecular biology to meet with their assigned family — community volunteers who agree to allow medical students into their homes and lives to be up-close witnesses to what it’s like for a family to cope with chronic and debilitating illness. Students forge close bonds with the families and often accompany them
to various appointments to see firsthand how fragmentation and communication barriers in the health system can impact well-being. Experiencing medicine from the patient’s point of view is a life-altering experience and an essential piece of learning to put patients at the center of healthcare.
Community immersion: The view from 30,000 feet During their first two years of medical school, Geisinger Commonwealth students have a chance to change a community and, in the process, gain the tools and learn the strategies necessary to enhance population health anywhere. Through Experiential Learning in Community Settings (ELICS), students spend time in a specific community and get to know the residents and their unique problems. In addition, they work with partner agencies and healthcare providers (including all members of an interdisciplinary team) to identify population health challenges endemic
to the community. The pinnacle of the experience, however, is the Longitudinal Community Health Intervention Project (L-CHIP). Mushfiq Tarafder, PhD, director of Preventive Health and Community Studies and associate professor of epidemiology, said that L-CHIPs offer students a community health research project that not only targets a large enough population, but also follows it over enough time to collect meaningful data that can be analyzed to determine an intervention’s effect. “The main idea is to give students real contact with community and incorporate hands-on experiences with population health. These are robust projects meant to have lasting impact. The students build intervention projects in collaboration with our partner agencies and they go through every step: literature review, planning, IRB approval, recruiting participants and collecting and analyzing data. This experience is something they can take with them anywhere, and the lessons learned translate to any community,” he said.
Fast fact: Geisinger Commonwealth students completed 15,960 hours of service in academic year 2018–2019.
3
MD-Booklet.indd 3
8/16/19 9:13 AM