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The Student Exercise

Overview

“Teaching the knowledge and skills of practice based learning and improvement to medical students and residents is a necessary and important foundation for improving patient care” (Ogrinc, et al. 2003), however it remains a practical challenge. Medical students rarely have their own continuity practice; can be part of an interdisciplinary team but in a frequently transient capacity; and are subjected to a variety of changing health systems every few weeks. The following exercises will allow all of you a “hands on” experience to identify some of the processes in effective quality improvement in the health care of diabetes patients.

Part One

Using the “Standards of Diabetes Care” from the American Diabetes Association, you will each conduct four chart audits on diabetic patients from your “Cybertown Family Health Center.”  The data will allow you to see how your cyber-clinic’s quality care indicators stack up to national standards of care. This must be completed by the end of week one of the clerkship.

Part Two

You will each have two weeks to conduct a self directed field assignment that examines specific diabetes care issues from your real life clinical sites on your primary care clerkship. What are the demographics of your clinical site’s diabetes patients? What challenges face the patients with diabetes at your site? What multidisciplinary approaches exist at your sites? Are there continuous quality improvement projects to improve diabetes care? What programs or initiatives exist at community, state, and national levels? Are the initiatives culturally responsive to the patients at your site?

Part Three

You will post your brief reports to share with the other students in your primary care clerkship cohort across the country and your web module “cyber teacher” by the end of the second week of the clerkship. This will allow you to explore what is happening at all the clinical sites. The information from your investigation will then be used to come up with some intervention recommendations and continuous quality initiatives on your “Cybertown Family Health Center.”

The two P&S Family Medicine faculty who will be your "cyber teachers" for this assignment are:

Yael Swica, MD, MPH, MTS
Assistant Clinical Professor of Family Medicine
Project Director, Family Planning Services at Farrell

Areas of Interest:
Reproductive health, women's health, clinical research
Email: [email protected]

Richard Younge, MD, MPH
Assistant Professor of Clinical Medicine
Center for Family and Community Medicine

Areas of Interest:
Clinical Preventive Services, Community Oriented Primary Care, Practice Based Learning and Improvement, Community Health Workers, Behavioral Health and Primary Care, Health Information Systems, Eliminating Health Care Disparities
Email: [email protected]

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