Innovative Program Pairs UA Med Students with Local Physicians

TUSCALOOSA, Ala. — Several University of Alabama medical students have paired with community physicians as part of an innovative medical education program promoting deeper connections with patients and stronger student-teacher relationships.

Third-year medical students at the School of Medicine’s Tuscaloosa Regional Campus, which is located at UA’s College of Community Health Sciences, are participating in a new medical education program — the Tuscaloosa Longitudinal Community Curriculum, or TLC².

TLC² follows an innovative model of medical education, a longitudinal integrated clerkship, which allows medical students an opportunity to follow patients over the course of their third-year of clinical education.

Students participating in this year’s program include Amanda Shaw, Courtney Newsome, Jessica Powell, Maria Gulas, Caitlin Tidwell, Danielle Fincher and Chase Childers.

This differs from the traditional four- to eight-week clerkship models in medical education, in which students commonly experience single encounters or brief episodes of illness with a patient, and may fail to see and understand the evolution of health and disease over time and in the context of family, cultural and social determinants — education, jobs, safe housing, access to food and crime and violence.

Under the traditional model of medical education, all third-year medical students receive clinical education in the areas of pediatrics, internal medicine, surgery, family medicine, psychiatry, neurology and obstetrics/gynecology by working with physicians in clinic settings, and traditional rotation schedules consist of weeks-long rotations through each specialty.

But TLC² students spend most of their third-year working with a community physician and following patients throughout the diagnosis or disease, and covering the specialty areas continuously and often simultaneously.

For example, a student may gain competency in obstetrics during a pregnant patient’s visit, help deliver the patient’s baby and then follow the newborn through to her specialty consults, assist in surgery on the patient, then see the patient back in the primary care doctor’s office for follow-up visits.

TLC² is the only program following a longitudinal integrated clerkship model that is offered by The University of Alabama School of Medicine, which is headquartered in Birmingham.

The program is modeled after other well-established clerkships, including those at the University of Minnesota and Harvard Medical School, where research demonstrates that students going through a clerkship program are more satisfied with their experience, become attractive residency candidates, perform as well or better on standardized tests of knowledge and skills, yet have deeper connections with patients and attain and sustain higher levels of patient-centered attitudes.

All students at The University of Alabama School of Medicine receive their first two years of medical education at the school’s main campus in Birmingham. Students then receive their third and fourth years of clinical education at either the Birmingham campus or at branch campuses. One of the functions of the College of Community Health Sciences is to serve as the Tuscaloosa Regional Campus for The University of Alabama School of Medicine.