Training Students to be Change Agents
Aditee Narayan, BS’96, MD’00, HS’00-’06, MPH, is professor of pediatrics and associate dean for curricular affairs in the School of Medicine. In 2020, she led the development and implementation of the Patient First curriculum in the MD program. She’s long been passionate about medical education as a way of “amplifying the positive effect [physicians] have on patients and families.”
Medical education remains rooted in the same values — alleviating suffering, meeting patients where they are, generating and translating new scientific knowledge, and addressing health care disparities — but we may be addressing those needs in a different way in the future.
The Patient First curriculum — the most updated version of our medical education curriculum — interprets Duke’s traditions in a modern way, teaching patient care from the start with biomedical sciences taught through the clinical lens.
We’ve started embracing the fact that the role of the physician will be different in 5, 10, or 20 years. While they’ll continue to be highly trained in clinical skills, they must have other skills, like knowing how to identify opportunities for technology-based innovation and partnering with colleagues who have expertise in this space. We need to harness technology in a way that allows us to be at the bedside and do the work that only we can do.
We must develop more skills in population-based health. We already teach the care of individual patients — we need to teach more about caring for communities to solve our biggest challenges.
The value of working in teams will remain. What will change is an expanded definition of the health care team to include social sciences, public policy, business, law, and environmental sciences. Learning how to engage our interdisciplinary partners will bring far more effective solutions than working in silos.
We have to focus on training students to be change agents. The current health care system is not working as it should, and solutions will come only if we’re able to train our students to think of health care differently from the beginning.
What Comes Next:
- Neuroscience: Using New Technologies to Understand the Brain
- Vaccines: Fine-tuning Immune Response
- Geriatric Medicine: Caring for the Aging Brain
- Health Equity: Addressing Disparities in Pallative Care
- Cancer Research and Care: Personalized and More Effective Therapies
- Epidemiology and Population Health: Reaching Beyond Our Walls
- Integrative Immunobiology: Unraveling the Mysteries of the Human Immune System
- Genomics and Precision Health: Using Genetic Tools to Prevent Disease
Story originally published in DukeMed Alumni News, Fall 2024.
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