Abstract
This article was migrated. The article was marked as recommended. In response to a curricular vision of improved social accountability, our Doctor of Medicine program launched a year-long integrated Social Medicine course designed and implemented for Year 1 medical school students. Our school is a moderate sized medical school serving a region of close to 2 M people in central Canada. The Schulich School of Medicine & Dentistry Doctor of Medicine Program at Western University, London, Ontario Canada, is grounded in a four-year curriculum, each year comprised of up to 171 students with a clinical clerkship in Year 3. Our curriculum is delivered in a distributed fashion between two campuses approximately 200 km apart: London (133) and Windsor (38) learners.The vision of our leadership and learner partners was to provide students with an opportunity to concentrate early in their career on the impact of social, cultural and economic forces on medicine and patient care. Under the umbrella of this new Social Medicine course, we incorporated previous courses in population health, epidemiology, ethics and service learning to provide an exposure to cultural and societal roots; social inequalities; factors impacting treatment outcomes; ethical challenges and experiential community learning opportunities. This article, based upon our Short Communication, "Social Medicine, New Medicine? Redefining Social Medicine for Year 1 medical students", presented at AMEE in Barcelona, 2016, will discuss the origins of our course design as well as the rationale, objectives and caveats of this particular course.
Highlights
Schools struggle to create a context of learning around the community and societal needs that support students understanding the deep impact of the social determinants of health on patient presentation, progression and outcomes
Students are steered through social learning experiences such as service learning to rediscover what they cited as why they entered medicine. (Hunt et al 2011) while a traditional approach of offering individual courses in meeting the social values of care fulfills learner satisfaction in a traditional pedagogic model, it loses out on integration and presentation in the actual context of patient care. (Eckenfels 1997)
Canadian and American medical education is grounded in a national accreditation standard directing the mandatory implementation in curriculum of service learning. (Schools of CoAoCM 2015, Education LCoM 2015) Our mandate for service learning within our program was to follow a traditional model of uniting academic study and community service in mutually reciprocal ways
Summary
Schools struggle to create a context of learning around the community and societal needs that support students understanding the deep impact of the social determinants of health on patient presentation, progression and outcomes. (Hunt et al 2011) while a traditional approach of offering individual courses in meeting the social values of care fulfills learner satisfaction in a traditional pedagogic model, it loses out on integration and presentation in the actual context of patient care. To do so in 2015, prior to the design and implementation of our Social Medicine course, we implemented "Service Learning" into our Year 1 curriculum. In designing this portion of our curriculum, we were aware this educational approach was rooted in the pedagogical theories of Dewey and Freire (Deans 1999, Ferrari & Cather 2002, Stewart &Wubbena 2015). While purposed not to be acting with patients and families within a medical capacity, we trusted that our service learning experience would foster their learning in four key domains: reflection, self and other awareness, engagement, and systems knowledge
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