By ERIN PUSTAY, The Independent
Posted Aug 17, 2009
Passion is something you can’t teach.
So Aultman is doing its best to foster it.
This summer, college students from around the area participated in a summer symposium that connected them with the fields they love and the experience they need to drive their studies during the school year. Participants met with health care professionals and participated in research projects that forced students to think more deeply and critically about medical and health care issues.
“The major thing is for them to understand what the health professions are all about to help them determine what it is they want to do,” said Sue Mercer, Aultman’s director of medical education and research. “We want to develop that interest in people who have a passion for the profession and the only way for them to know about that is to make sure they have that experience.”
Ryan McDonough, a 2007 Jackson High School graduate and a student at the University of Dayton, said this was exactly the kind of experience that brings classroom learning to life.
“I really like it, it’s a great experience” McDonough said. “When you get to be there and be hands-on or obtain first-hand knowledge that really adds to the experience.”
In addition to shadowing several doctors and surgeons who are part of the Aultman family, McDonough was part of a small student research team that explored patient compliance with prescription drugs. As part of the study, the group looked at how doctors can better communicate with patients and how best to prescribe medicines that the patients are likely to take.
For McDonough, the research was eye-opening.
“In medicine, the patient is always number one,” McDonough said. “Anything a medical professional can do to (improve patient relations) is most important.”
While conducting the small study, in which volunteers ate Tic Tac candies every day as if they were prescribed medications, the students in McDonough’s group had to follow HIPPA practices when following up with their peer “patients.”
“It was a challenge,” McDonough said of working with HIPPA.
Putting students smack-dab in the middle of the medical profession is the key to the success of the Summer Symposium, Mercer said.
“Health care is going to need lot of resources in the future,” Mercer said, “not only terms of finances and technology, but human resources. People need to be exposed to this at an age where they can make decision about the quality of the health care profession they are going into.”
Along the way, however, the medical professionals who work with the students end up gaining as much from the experience. If nothing else, they walk away with reinvigorated about the jobs they do.
“One of the things that is very energizing as an educator,” Mercer said, “is the amount of enthusiasm the students show and their reflections on their futures.”
