New medical school focus on community-based training

By Jackie Valley

Thursday, Sept. 24, 2015 | 2 a.m.

When Barbara Atkinson arrived in Las Vegas a year ago as the planning dean of UNLV’s new medical school, she spent her first months meeting community members.

She wanted their help: How could we keep newly-minted doctors in town?

“The need for doctors is just unbelievable,” said Atkinson, who came from the University of Kansas Medical Center. In part, she hoped the new school would help alleviate the region’s dire physician shortage.

For Atkinson and officials at Roseman University, which is building a medical school at its Summerlin campus, it soon became clear that curriculum would be key. Here’s their theory: If medical students are immersed in the community for their education, they might be more inclined to stay here.

“This is about understanding the community and serving the community," said Mark Penn, the founding dean of Roseman University’s College of Medicine.

Earlier this summer, UNLV officials began meeting with faith-based organizations to discuss ways to involve students in the community, Atkinson said. They’ve spoken with more than 20 faith-based or community organizations, such as Lutheran Social Services, Nevada Partnership for Homeless Youth, Opportunity Village and Three Square.

UNLV plans to have medical students spend two hours weekly volunteering at these organizations for the first year and a half of the students’ education. The doctors-in-training might be assisting the organizations’ clients over the phone or in person, getting an up-close glimpse of how a person’s social circumstances influence their health, Atkinson said. The students later will spend an entire month doing community service, providing hands-on care to the people served by those organizations.

“I think their plans to have community outreach be a central part of the medical school are fantastic,” said Robert Hoo, lead organizer for Nevadans for the Common Good. “We have to be patient, though. It’s going to take them a while to get up to speed.”

The UNLV School of Medicine’s plan for third-year students also veers from the norm. Rather than rotate through various specialties at hospitals, the students will be placed in one of three outpatient clinics — located in North Las Vegas, Henderson and central Las Vegas — for the year. The goal is for students to better understand the area where their patients live and see how patients’ medical conditions are treated longitudinally as opposed to a single, emergency event that landed someone in the hospital. Atkinson pointed to diabetes as a prime example. “You want to see the care of diabetes across time,” she said. “You don’t learn how to care for diabetes when you only see the very acute episode in the hospital.”

In the process, the students will encounter cases in areas the same as the ones that they would have seen in traditional rotations, including in specialities like psychiatry or women’s health. “I don’t think there’s another school that’s done this type of curriculum,” Atkinson said.

Soon, it will have company. Roseman’s College of Medicine is pursuing similar community-minded teaching methods.

Medical students’ orientation at Roseman will provide students with an understanding of how the Southern Nevada health system works. Later in their education, like in UNLV’s medical school, the students will spend time in a designated community health clinic, where they will learn not only about diagnosing and treating patients, but also about the surrounding environment.

“It’s very important to understand the challenges and needs of that neighborhood,” Penn said. For instance, “How do patients get there? Is there a bus line? What’s the high school in the area?”

Officials from both medical schools hope these tactics produce better doctors and ones committed to serving the Las Vegas community. The second goal also relies on recruiting the right students—people from here or with family ties—and creating more graduate medical education programs, which would allow medical students to stay in Southern Nevada for their residencies.

Both school expect to start classes in the fall of 2017.

If those things fall into place, Atkinson said, “there’s sort of no excuse to leave.”

Jackie Valley can be reached at 702-524-8269 or [email protected]. Follow Jackie on Twitter at twitter.com/JackieValley