New TCU medical school addresses physician shortage with an innovative curriculum | Opinion
This is important because the federal government stopped funding new residency slots in 1997. Since then, the population of Texas has grown significantly, the physician shortage increased and new medical schools like ours stepped up to meet the needs.
But without residency programs to train our new graduates, the state can’t address these shortages. Combating the physician shortage in Texas is a two-pronged solution — more new doctors and more graduate medical education slots. When we started this medical school, we knew two things — we wanted to improve how medical education was delivered, with a steady focus on patient care, and we wanted to grow graduate medical education to increase the number of physicians in Texas. We’ve met both of those goals but must continue to make advances. We’ve created a curriculum that puts the patient at the center of everything and values communication, compassion and empathy. A small example of communication lies in the first conversation you have with your physician on a visit. Studies show that it takes physicians about 30 seconds to ask the first question once patients start to share the reason for the visit. However, it takes about 90 seconds for patients to feel they got to share what was most important to them. Recognizing the doctor-patient relationship does have time constraints, this additional minute for patients to tell their story leads to the patients feeling heard and the physicians learning critical information to make a better diagnosis. To help students prepare for the future, we’ve launched the Future Accelerators of Medicine and Beyond course where students think about and learn to prepare for how medicine will be practiced in 2040, not 1990. These will be inevitable and immense changes, and our students will be prepared to embrace and even lead us into the future. Each student is required to complete a four-year Scholarly Pursuit and Thesis research project that values the students’ intrinsic curiosity, inspires them to be leaders in driving advances in medicine throughout their career, critical thinking and lifelong learning. We also have a Longitudinal Integrated Clerkship that partners each student with a preceptor across eight medical disciplines. This training model is the foundation for our graduates to deliver empathetic and compassionate medicine. Recognizing the role of physicians in their community, we also encourage our students to embrace the importance of servant leadership through local and global partnerships with underserved communities in the Dallas-Fort Worth area and beyond. This instills the importance of battling health disparities and the role they can play in creating change as future physicians. Why are we modifying how we are training the next generation of physicians? In addition to knowing we all want our doctor to be well-versed and contemporary in the science and knowledge of medicine, we also want our doctor to engage with us very personally, listening to our concerns with compassion and empathy. At the end of the day, our goal is to create expertly trained physicians who will serve patients and their families with excellent care and compassion. We are proud of our new model of medical education at the Burnett School of Medicine at TCU, excited for our new graduates, and grateful for the partners who joined this new medical school in our journey to transform medical education. Stuart D. Flynn, M.D., is the founding dean of Anne Burnett Marion School of Medicine at Texas Christian University. He wrote this column for The Dallas Morning News.
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