Concentration: Medical Education

Project Mentor: Richard Dollase, EdD and Paul George, MD

Graduation Year: MD 2011

Concentration Title:
Advanced Clinical Skills Elective/Pilot

Concentration Description:
My summer experience was two-fold. The first portion was spent in Greece working with the Ormylia Foundation, a community health initiative sponsored by the Ormylia Monastery. The two projects I was involved in was 1) Ormylia’s initiative to provide free breast and cervical cancer screening to underserved and immigrant women in Greece and 2) their initiative to provide high-quality continuing medical education to health professionals in developing countries. For this latter project I assisted in organizing and running the Ormylia Breast Health Conference in July 2008. At this teaching conference we hosted faculty from American and European medical schools and participants (radiologists, technicians, and public health organizers) from Azerbaijan, Bosnia, Eritrea, Greece and Turkey. The conference included radiology didactics, skill workshops, and public health discussions. The second half of my summer experience was back at Brown working with the Office of Curriculum Affairs to revise the Brain Sciences course offered in the first year of medical school. From my second year and onward I remained involved in medical education by taking on various teaching roles. From 2008 to present I have served as a tutor for in the preclinical sciences. In my second year I was a Teaching Fellow for the Doctoring course, which entailed working with a group of first-year students over the course of the year working on interviewing and physical exam skills. I also was a Teaching Assistant for the Brain Sciences course, providing office hours and conducting review sessions. In 2008-2009 I also sat on the Preclinical Curriculum subcommittee. Most recently, this year I have been working with Dr. Schiffman at the Miriam Hospital to organize teaching physical diagnosis rounds. During these rounds students first individually interview and examine patients. The group then rounds together and students illustrate exams and/or findings to the group with additional teaching from Dr. Schiffman and the coordinator (such as myself). The group debriefs and students are assigned topics relevant to their patient’s findings or exam skills, which they afterwards write up and share with the other participants. These rounds are new and we are still tweaking the format.I plan on continuing these rounds with Dr. Schiffman throughout the next year, and a version of these rounds will be incorporated into my final project of a “pilot” advanced clinical skills course.