Jesse Burk-Rafel & Rajesh Suresh Mangrulkar, MD
An excerpt from third-year medical student Jesse Burk-Rafel's Q&A with AMA Wire:
AMA Wire®: Last February, you spoke with AMA Wire about your work with the University of Michigan Medical School’s curriculum redesign as a member of the AMA’s Accelerating Change in Medical Education Consortium. You mentioned that the previous curriculum didn’t “do enough to frame the issues facing health care, help with personal development of students’ existing leadership strengths or even break down barriers for students as future physicians.” How do you think Michigan’s new curriculum is helping students to better engage with these topics now?
Burk-Rafel: Many ways. Michigan’s new curriculum will equip students to be leaders in addressing health care challenges. One concrete way is inclusion of core curriculum in health policy, which students have—for many years—been craving.
In addition, students will develop expertise in other topics, like quality improvement and patient safety, that extend beyond the patient-physician interaction and require systems thinking. This training will be complemented by practical, longitudinal mentored professional development. Today’s medical students bring a wealth of skills and passions when they enter medical school, and we should be doing everything possible to cultivate those passions and develop leadership skills so that they might turn their passions into real impact. Thus, students will work with multiple coaches and mentors from day one.
The professional development focus of our new curriculum is tremendously exciting to me—I think it will provide students opportunities to better understand the landscape of U.S. health care and how they might make an impact while having a fulfilling career. In short, I expect future Michigan graduates to be in a better position to craft their dream career.
To read the rest of the Q&A, click below.