Hofstra North Shore-LIJ School of Medicine at Hofstra University Inaugural Year Comes to a Close; Second Class Prepares for August 1 As the Hofstra North Shore-LIJ School of Medicine at Hofstra University wraps up its inaugural year, the first class, composed of 40 students, has an extensive collection of patient experiences to reflect on – experiences usually reserved for medical residents. These patient experiences, which included attending surgeries, delivering babies and rotating through many of the North Shore-LIJ Health System’s hospitals and physician group practices, taught the students biomedical science through real patient encounters.
A Look at the Medical School’s Curriculum EMT Training: The First Nine Weeks During the first nine weeks of the medical school’s curriculum, students trained, and were then certified, as emergency medical technicians by working shifts on North Shore-LIJ Health System ambulances, responding to 911 calls. This training is one of the core elements of the first 100 weeks of the school’s groundbreaking academic course work. During ambulance tours, students observe patients in their homes and evaluate and treat them under the supervision of certified EMTs and paramedics. The EMT training culminates in a Multiple Casualty Incident (MCI) conducted at the FDNY Training Academy on Randall’s Island, where the students provide emergency care during the exercise, followed by a full debriefing. The day at Randall’s Island offers a unique opportunity for the students to gain hands-on, realistic experiences – encountering fire, smoke and seriously wounded victims.
PEARLS The medical school’s curriculum is based on an innovative educational method called PEARLS — Patient-Centered Explorations in Active Reasoning, Learning and Synthesis. Students meet in small groups three times a week to uncover and learn the biomedical science underneath real patient cases. These themes and concepts identified during PEARLS integrate with other learning sessions, labs and clinical experiences the students have during the week.
Structure Lab Students spend one day a week in the Structure Lab, a state-of-the-art environment that offers the most advanced tools to learn gross and microscopic anatomy and features clinically relevant pathology and imaging. In general, each laboratory session includes several stand-alone stations, each of which has discrete learning objectives that coincide with the cases the students study in their PEARLS classes that week. School of Medicine faculty from the North Shore-LIJ Health System also participate in Structure sessions, thereby bringing their expertise to the learning process.
Simulation Training at the Center for Learning and Innovation As part of the first-year experience, students spend many hours at North Shore-LIJ Health System’s Center for Learning and Innovation (CLI) and its Patient Safety Institute, where they learn and strengthen their clinical skills through the use of simulation education. Simulation education provides a critical bridge between classroom learning and real-life clinical experience. During the first year students are exposed to simulation exercises that most medical schools cover in the third year, offering our students a distinct advantage. Lessons taught in realistic simulations are more effectively retained through active learning, focused concentration, emotional investment, and direct association with the real world. The CLI’s high-tech, computerized mannequins mimic real patients that talk and respond to medical students as they take vital signs and perform emergency procedures, such as intravenous line and breathing tube insertions and medication administration. CLI helps students manage hypothetical patient cases as members of a multidisciplinary health care team. The exercises are followed by a debriefing with medical school faculty and CLI staff. In addition to CLI, medical students also train at the world-renowned Feinstein Institute for Medical Research, the research arm of the North Shore-LIJ Health System.