Teaching Doctors to Treat the Individual
[Writer] This is research news from U-I-C – the University of Illinois at Chicago.
Today, Alan Schwartz, associate professor of medical education and pediatrics at the UIC College of Medicine talks about his study showing that doctors can be taught to listen for unique circumstances in their patient’s lives that may require an individualized treatment plan.
Here’s professor Schwartz :
[Schwartz] Sometimes patients have unique circumstances in their lives that should affect their care, and we call that context, and in previous research my colleagues and I found that doctors often have trouble taking care of patients who have this kind of unique context.
We wanted to know if we could make them better at taking care of these patients by making them think about context when they see the patients. We divided the fourth year medical students into two groups and for the last two years one of the groups received workshops to teach them how to do this and the other group served as a control group. We compared the two groups of medical students by having them see four standardized
patients. These are actors who are trained to portray patients in the same way every time. The students act as doctors to these patients. They make a diagnosis and they write up a treatment plan. All the students saw the same four cases and using these standardized patients we were able to determine whether the students had improved at taking care of patients who had unique and complex contexts.
For example, a patient who comes in with worsening asthma may simply need to have his inhaler dose increased. But if the patient tells their doctor that they’ve lost their job, the doctor should ask about that because it may be that the patient isn’t using their medication properly because they can’t afford it and increasing the dosage wouldn’t help. The doctor in that situation should be prescribing a cheaper or alternative inhaler.
The study was quite successful. In our control group students correctly treated the contextually complicated patients about 25 percent of the time. In the group that received our workshops that went up to two thirds of the time. All the students did equally well at treating other kinds of patients.
So our workshop was not only effective at improving their abilities to individualize care, but it focused specifically on that ability without affecting their other abilities as a doctor. Our key finding, then, is that individualized care is something that can be taught and should be part of training doctors.
[Writer] Alan Schwartz is an associate professor of medical education and pediatrics at the UIC College of Medicine.
For more information about this research, go to www.today.uic.edu, click on “news releases” and look for the release dated Sept. 14, 2010.
This has been research news from U-I-C – the University of Illinois at Chicago.
