Co-creating health with students
About the project
What is the adequate role of students in health care? Should students be just learners, or should they act with a system relevant role? Can they help to transform our health care system towards mot patient centeredness?
Learning in practice settings is essential for health care students. By participating in health care, they gain practical knowledge, clinical skills and a professional identity. They learn how to communicate and how to collaborate. However, the learning conditions in practical settings have become problematic during the last years. In a dynamic health care with growing complexity and specialization, with accelerating working density and high economic pressure, learning is often put at the back end. Time and space for educating students are rare. Instead, clerkships are often experienced by students as being assigned to routine jobs and without enough supervised actions. As a result, students miss meaningful learning opportunities, the start as junior professional is expected to be very stressful with inadequate preparation leading to anxiety for being overstrained, for doing failures, to burn out and to drop-out thoughts.
During the last years a growing number of educational projects were developed where education and care are combined and where students are integrated in health care with a meaningful role. In clinical education wards, they take care of patients being a member of interprofessional teams. In longitudinal integrated clerkships, student act as health coaches providing care for chronically ill patients. Student run clinics offer help for underserved people.
The background
The Lancet Commission for Education of Health Professionals for the 21st century stated that we have to recognize that challenges of health care have changed. Our healthcare problems are complex, with a progression of chronic diseases, they are influenced by social inequity and by lifestyle. The commission calls to complement the traditional way of education that is focused on informative and formative learning wit Transformative Learning. While the traditional education focuses on informative learning with acquiring knowledge and specific skills, the focus now is also to acquire competencies that are related to transformative learning: leadership, management, collaboration, communication. The aim of such a form of education is to collaborate in teams to induce and to manage transformation of the local healthcare towards the needs of the individual patient and the population. While these recommendations were already published in 2010, the progress is slow. And we have to admit that our educational concepts are still mainly from the 20th century.
At Witten Herdecke University we have developed Clinical Education Wards where final year medical students are integrated in hospital care with an active and autonomous role. Students are supported to take care of patients with adequate supervision and learning support. We developed theses Student Wards due to educational reasons. Learning with responsibilities is much more effective than being in a passive role and doing simple routine tasks. We also evaluated the perceived quality of healthcare. How would patients react to such a ward, where their first contact person is a beginner? Our research results revealed that patients appreciated the work of students. They talked that students had a significant impact on their care, fostering higher patient centeredness and comprehensive care. Could it be that students have an impact on the way we care for patients. Similar research results were reported although from interprofessional CEW.s
(maybe put paragraph about the CIC and how they do their work here)