How Should Medical Care That Emphasizes Human Relationships Be Taught to Future Doctors?
INDIANAPOLIS - Researchers from the Indiana University School of Medicine
and Regenstrief Institute Inc. are collaborating with the Fetzer Institute
on a project of nearly $2 million to study how to better educate future
doctors to include human relations as they dispense health care. The nation’s
second largest medical school, which this year will graduate its first
class trained to link competency, professionalism, ethics and life long
learning, will serve as a laboratory for the study of relationship-centered
medical care.
The IU and Regenstrief researchers will investigate how relationship-centered
care -- which brings physicians’ relationships with their patients,
their patients' families, other caregivers, and communities into play
-- can be incorporated in a medical school curriculum and post-medical
school training thereby influencing the way future physicians practice
medicine. The researchers also will conduct investigational studies on
relationship-centered care itself.
Over the next three years, they will look at how to train future physicians
to focus on these interpersonal interactions, to provide care in a fashion
that expresses the same principles as the old fashioned bedside manner
of simpler times when physicians were not pressured to see patients in
a short period of time. They also plan to teach medical students how this
compassionate care can be practiced by physicians in the competitive health
care environment of the twenty-first century.
In addition to working with medical students, residents and fellows,
the IU and Regenstrief investigators will develop a body of research to
shed light on what clinicians and patients are actually doing, thinking
and feeling as they interact.
Thomas S. Inui, Sc.M., M.D, associate dean for health care research,
and the Sam Regenstrief Professor of Health Services Research at the Indiana
University School of Medicine and president and chief executive officer
of Regenstrief Institute Inc., will lead the project over a three-year
period.
Dr. Inui believes that “meaningful relationships in health care
were never more important than they are today. Effective health care is
built on a foundation of trust and collaboration, not only on the basis
of technical expertise.” Dr. Inui also sits on an Institute of Medicine
committee that is studying relationship-centered care. The IOM is a part
of the National Academies of Science.
“Relationship-centered care means that we have to think a little
bit differently about how we approach patients, how we approach health
care colleagues, and how we approach our students. Quality health care
and quality medical education are all about quality relations with one
another,” said Stephen Leapman, M.D., executive associate dean for
educational affairs at the IU School of Medicine.
The Fetzer Institute is a private operating foundation based in Kalamazoo, Mich. that supports research, education, and service programs exploring the integral relationships among body, mind, and spirit. “Movement in the direction of relationship-centered care in the life world of academic medicine would be galvanized if even one medical school/academic medical center could seriously undertake this kind of change process, document its journey, share perspectives with peer schools, and measure the impact of what it has done on the members of the academic community viewed broadly. We propose to take that journey at the Indiana University School of Medicine,” said David Sluyter of Fetzer.
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Media Contact: Cindy Fox Aisen
caisen@iupui.edu
317-274-7722
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