Going where no medical school has gone before....

On the front page of the Saturday (July 23, 2011) New York Times, an article by A.G. Sulzberger proclaimed Small-Town Doctors Made in a Small Kansas Town.  This week, the University of Kansas School of Medicine is opening a new campus in Salina, Kansas.  Salina will be the smallest town in the US to host a four-year medical campus. The stated purpose of the new campus is produce primary care doctors that will practice in rural Kansas. Dr. Heidi Chumley, the KU Senior Associate Dean for Medical Education and Associate Vice Chancellor for Educational Resources and Interprofessional Education, is leading KU's development of this campus with strong support from Chancellor Bernadette Gray-Little and EVC / Executive Dean Barbara Atkinson. The fact that this article ran on the front page of the NY Times is a testament to the uniqueness of this new campus. The LCME reviewers of the Salina program thought that it was "an interesting model" that "could be a stimulus for other schools".

As you might expect, the program has generated a lot of interest:

Dave Ranney from the Kansas Health Institute had a nice article on the KHI web site on July 5, 2011, New Salina med school campus unique in U.S. I will be reposting an excerpted version of this article in the next few days.

Elana Gordon of KCUR, the University of Missouri-KC NPR affiliate, did a nice article about the new campus, Tiny School to Create Tiny Town Docs. This ten-minute interview with Dr. Chumley ran on the air and a podcast is posted at this link.

Roger Cornish, from KWCH 12 Eyewitness News (a Wichita CBS affiliate), has a great interview with Kayla Johnson and several of the other new first year medical students at the Salina campus. You can watch the video of the interview titled, Classes begin at K-U Med / Salina.

Lily Wu from KAKE (another Wichita TV station) did an interview of the students and staff at the new campus, Medical Students Interested in Serving Small Towns.

I am sure that there will be more press on this over the next few days and weeks. Congratulations to Dr. Chumley and the University of Kansas for this historic endeavor.

Follow up

I wanted to follow up on some issues that I have blogged about recently.

On February 4, 2011, in my post Why do we put so much import on the MCAT , I wrote about the value of the admissions test for medical school. The Medical College Admissions Test is one of several screening mechanisms used by medical schools to determine who should be allowed to pursue medical training. A recent editorial (1) in the New England Journal of Medicine by Joshua Tompkins (Science Journalist and Medical Student at the USC Keck School of Medicine) discussed the expense of MCAT and Board prep courses. According to Mr. Tompkins, medical students are taken advantage of by a "multi-million-dollar industry in commercial exam-preparation assistance". These (for-profit) companies play on student's fears--fears of failing, of not getting a high enough score to get into their residency of choice, their fear of not matching in any residency.  The problem is that there is little to no evidence that these board prep courses actually do anything to affect a student's score on the MCAT  or USMLE step 1.  A systematic review of commercial test preparation (2) found that "current research lacks control and rigor" and the evidence to support these courses was weak or non-existent. According to Mr. Tompkins, pre-clinical medical students "focus on obscure minutiae and rare conditions" and "spend less time studying the common diseases they will face during clerkships, residency, and practice".

And while we are talking about medical school admissions. In another recent blog, Personality traits that predict success in medical school , I wrote about using personality profiles to chose which students should be in medical school. An article in the July 10, 2011 New York Times by Gardiner Harris, New for Aspiring Doctors, the People Skills Test reports on the use of a specific type of medical interview that is being implemented at Virginia Tech Carilion School of Medicine in Roanoke, VA. The Dean at Virginia Tech Carilion is a family doctor named Dr. Cynda Johnson. She happens to also be a former resident and faculty member from the University of Kansas. Virginia Tech Carilion (and several other schools) are using the multiple mini interview or MMI to screen potential medical students. The test is administered to students as part of their medical school interview and is designed to "assess how well candidates think on their feet and how willing they are to work in teams". According to Dean Johnson, "if people do poorly on the MMI, they will not be offered positions" in the medical school class.  The MMI is also a pretty good predictor of performance in the preclinical years of medical school. (3)

Way to go Virginia Tech. This is definitely a step in the right direction.

References:

(1) Tompkins J.  Money for Nothing? The Problem of the Board-Exam Coaching Industry. NEJM 2011; 365 (2): 104-105.

(2) McGaghie WC, Downing SM, Kubilius R. What is the impact of commercial test preparation courses on medical examination performance?  Teach Learn Med 2004; 16 (2): 202-11.

(3) Eva KW, et al.  The ability of the multiple mini-interview to predict preclerkship performance in medical school. Acad Med  2004; 79 (10 Suppl): S40-2.