North Carolina AHEC Program
summer 2009 newsletter | home
Four Medical Students from UNC Will Complete Last Two Years of Medical School in Asheville
The UNC-Chapel HillSchool of Medicine, Mission Hospital in Asheville, Mountain AHEC, and WNC Health Network are pleased to announce that medical students Pai Lui, Laurie Atterton Meyers, Katie Norfleet and Amy Marietta will be moving to Asheville in July 2009 to complete their third and fourth year of medical school. They will be participating in an innovative curriculum similar to the longitudinal “Cambridge Model” which gives students the opportunity to learn clinical medicine from the perspective of the patient. The integrated curriculum requires a smaller number of dedicated teachers and a greater reliance on outpatient teaching. The students will spend the first 12 weeks at Mission Hospital doing their surgery and OB GYN rotations. In September, they will begin following patients with community attending physicians in their offices for family medicine, internal medicine, pediatrics, psychiatry, neurology and cardiology. The students will follow “their patients” everywhere, e.g., for an x-ray, physical therapy, surgery and will learn medicine as seen by the patient - indeed a novel, but valuable perspective.
In recent years, the U.S. medical educational system has fallen short of training physicians in community settings, producing sufficient numbers of primary care physicians and training doctors in the type of practice that is typical for the vast majority of physicians. Some medical schools have introduced new curriculum that could help to address these deficiencies in medical education.This new curriculum, tested at Harvard and highlighted in an article published in Academic Medicine, may very well be the curriculum of the future for all medical students. The fourth year curriculum will be block scheduled and consist of opportunities to participate in rotations in rural WNC, urban settings and internationally.
The Asheville community is well suited to this type of curriculum because of Mountain AHEC’s long standing experience and excellence in medical education and the outstanding health sciences library; as well as, the strong specialty private practice setting and robust primary care services of the Asheville medical community. There will be more exposure to experienced practicing physicians and a much greater likelihood that students will see the same patients over an extended period of time and through the continuum of care.
The admissions process for selecting the students was designed to ensure success of the students and the program. Although the longitudinal curriculum should be well suited to any student, the program with its small group of students and close working relationship with their core faculty looked for students with the characteristics of self-reliance, internal motivation, and high level of responsibility. The admissions committee felt gratified that there were excellent students applying for the opportunity.