Pictured: Dr. Nash Witten (JABSOM MD 2017) during his longitudinal training at North Hawaiʻi Community Hospital, with surgery team members Ronny Triphahn, Carol Aceret, Kamalu Joaquin and Dr. Howard Wong.
The University of Hawaiʻi medical school has an innovative, problem-based curriculum. The school also was a pioneer in long-term, community-based student clinical training.
By Tina Shelton, JABSOM Communications Director
Harvard University’s medical school had the opportunity to thank the University of Hawaiʻi in person recently, as one of its leaders noted that Harvard modeled its medical school’s “longitudinal clerkships after the one at the University of Hawaiʻi (UH) John A. Burns School of Medicine (JABSOM).
“We actually built our longtitudinal clerkship program after having a phone call with the people here in Hawaiʻi. So, yeah, we’re sort of one of the children of your program,” said Dr. David Hirsh, Director of the Harvard Medical School-Cambridge Integrated Clerkship.
“Hawaiʻi had this very strong sense of social accountability and community engagement,” said Dr. Hirsh. “We saw those as fundamental to medical education as well. Hawaiʻi also thought very deliberately, ‘How do we design the education to get the outcomes we as a university and as a state seek for our patients?’ In other words,” he said, “there were workforce imperatives.” The UH medical school needed to train its future physicians in communities where doctors were most needed, to interest them in practicing in those areas after graduation and residency training. The school also wanted to nurture future physicians from cultural and ethnic groups not adequately represented by the health care workforce.
Dr. Hirsh visited Hawaiʻi to speak at the 2018 Hawaiʻi Health Professions Conference at JABSOM, which coincided with the 25th anniversary of JABSOM adopting what was considered at the time to be a highly-innovative way to train future doctors.
What is a longitudinal clerkship?
It is a longer period of time where a medical student is assigned into a community health center or physician’s office. At JABSOM, MD students choosing the longitudinal (also called 6-L program) spend five-months in a single place, learning from volunteer faculty physicians called “preceptors.” The course is offered as an alternative track option for third-year medical students.
“The longer-term training in those communities allows the medical students to get intensive one-on-one mentoring from the physician they are paired with,” said Dr. Jill Omori, Director of Medical Education at JABSOM. “The students also get to witness the continuity of care (the care of a patient over a period of time, often including ongoing health management), which is an important concept in health care today.”
