Patient, Physician & Society

• Current students please visit Blackboard for current course schedules

The Patient, Physician & Society course provides a comprehensive, integrated introduction to professional skills and perspectives. The course meets two afternoons per week throughout the first two years and then once a month in the last two years. For the first two years one afternoon is devoted to the Patient and Physician relationship; students begin to build clinical skills through learning experiences that provide an integrated, biopsychosocial perspective of patient care. The other afternoon deals with Physician and Society matters and addresses ethics and human values, public health, and health policy. Activities in both tracks incorporate health promotion and disease prevention as a context for discussion.

The purpose of the PPS courses is to assist the students with their abilities to:

• Evaluate the interpersonal and situational dynamics of medical encounters
• Identify the physician's communication tasks within the context of health promotion
• Demonstrate a base of communication skills and strategies to accomplish basic communication tasks
• Explore higher order skills and difficult situations in a self-directed fashion
• Participate constructively with colleagues in giving and receiving feedback on clinical skills
• Demonstrate the ability to integrate skills in doctor-patient communication and medical interviewing, physical examination and clinical diagnostic reasoning by appropriately "working up" a patient
• Conduct a systematic review of communication skills
• Elicit information from patients regarding their illnesses, important information for the evaluation of common symptoms, the patients' perspectives and the impact of illness on their lives.
• Gain experience in evaluating abnormal physical findings
• Learn, practice and demonstrate the process of clinical diagnostic reasoning
• Demonstrate the ability to record clinical findings in writing and to communicate clinical information orally with colleagues
• Demonstrate an appropriate degree of comfort in approaching, communication with and examining patients
• Observe and be observed by peers and teachers in the clinical setting
• Provide constructive feedback to peers
• Discuss the social, cultural and ethical aspects of medicine, considering ethical issues formulated in philosophy, religion, interpretations of illness experiences and the patient--physician relationship as represented in history, literature, anthropology, sociology, law and public policy

The PPS sessions are designed for interactive learning; students work in small groups, practice skills with patient instructors, and devote time to field placements. The medical school class is divided into four "colleges" of equal size and demographic composition. Each college has a clinician as its mentor; the college mentor works with the students throughout all four years of the PPS course sequence listed below.

¹ Each college studies various aspects of a distinct health problem, e.g., alcoholism, diabetes, dementia, obesity, back pain, stress and illness, breast cancer, etc.