Illinois Medicine

I 14 | S P R I N G 2 0 1 8 patients make better choices that support health and happiness," says Fox, who oversees the wellness and resilience curricular components at the three COM campuses. "We recognize that advocacy is needed on many fronts to improve the national health care system's inadequate support for physician wellness. The wellness curriculum is intended to help our highly competent students stay resilient in the face of these challenges." The new Illinois Medicine Curriculum, which was rolled out to first-year students in August 2017, represents a radical departure from the traditional—or "classic" medical school curriculum (see Campus News, p. 4). "We've integrated wellness into this new framework in a variety of ways," explains Fox. "For instance, if the students have a case study about a patient with panic attacks, we may include relevant information for medical students about anxiety. During each synthesis week [immediately after exams], the students have two hours set aside for a wellness plenary, which is followed by small group discussions." These have covered topics such as recognizing burnout, sleep hygiene and the importance of self-compassion. Fox emphasizes that medical students are invited to suggest other areas in which the COM also can improve support. Gerald Wickham, MA, EdD, assistant dean for medical education and evaluation in Peoria, surveyed M1 students midway through the current academic year to gather data about the wellness programming in general and the plenaries in particular. Of the 67 percent of first- years who responded to the survey, nearly all (92 percent) said the curriculum on wellness was an important part of their medical school experience, 71 percent felt they had gained new insights about wellness, and 66 percent believed that the synthesis week wellness plenaries had improved their well-being. The survey results are heartening to Meenakshy Aiyer, MD, FACP, associate dean for academic affairs in Peoria. "This positive s there a place for poetry in medical school? Kristi Kirschner, MD, thinks so. When first-year medical students were learning about anatomy, in came the Poetry Foundation to conduct a small group activity about the body that involved writing poems about cadavers, says Kirschner, a visiting clinical professor in the College of Medicine's department of medical education and the leader of the Health Humanities Curriculum task force in the new COM curriculum. Kirschner and her fellow task-force members — who represent the fields of medical history, philosophy and ethics, sociology, disability studies and literature in medicine — have spent nearly two years integrating experiences like this into the new Illinois Medicine Curriculum. Tied into curricular themes, these new health humanities experiences range from philosophical discussions about professional ethics, to a conversation with a disabled artist about using art to hone observation skills about the body. Students also have a chance to sample a variety of elective health humanities experiences through medical colloquia. Students can choose to participate in such activities as a writing group, a graphic medicine session (a relatively new field that uses comics in health care education), a panel discussion with patients talking about living with illness or disabilities, or engagement with a medical historian about the way medicine has treated bodily differences over time. COM artists have also re-energized Body Electric , a journal of literary and visual arts created by medical students with support from faculty members in the department of medical education. "Our students spend a lot of time in medical school studying diseases and drugs and cells, but to apply all of that knowledge in the context of a human life requires an understanding of the patient experience at the human level," Kirschner says. "Things don't always present clearly or neatly in medicine. We believe that working with different modalities in the arts and humanities can help students understand how to deal with ambiguity and uncertainty, which is a very large part of medicine." — Susan Reich THE POETRY OF MEDICINE Kristi Kirschner First-year medical students at the COM have been the first cohort to experience and provide feedback about the updated Illinois Medicine Curriculum, which was rolled out in August and integrates a wellness framework in a variety of ways. P H O T O S : D I A N E S M U T N Y

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