Constance Park, M.D., Ph.D.

Course Director

Email: cmp4@columbia.edu

In Clinical Practice IV students return to the classroom for weekly discussions during their Back to the Classroom Selective. Goals of this course are 1.) To provide an opportunity for students to reflect on their profession, their goals, and their training while considering the mission of medicine and what it means to them as individuals. 2.) To encourage habits of open communication between colleagues as they work together to identify and address contemporary challenges in medicine throughout their careers. 3.) To explore major challenges facing medicine today. The four sessions are:

• Challenges and Strategies in Disease Prevention: Life style changes, cardiovascular disease, and stroke.
• Our Changing Health Care System: Economics, Organization and Ethical Challenges.
• The Physician and Patients near Death: Loss and grief, healing and curing, what can be done when nothing can be done.
• Selective Topics with attention to self-care. These include Physical Therapy, Pain Management, Human Rights, Economics, Nutrition, and Topics in Complementary and Alternative Therapeutics.

Clinical Months

Students are required to complete a total of eight electives. Five of the eight electives must be clinical and five must be completed at Columbia and/or its affiliated hospitals. All students must have one sub-internship/advanced clinical clerkship and one “Return to the Classroom” selective. No more than two months of electives in a particular specialty are permitted.

Research

Students interested in research may spend two or more months on a research project. As recipient of a National Institutes of Health award to encourage student research, P&S is able to offer a number of funded Research Fellowships to fourth year students undertaking a research project. Research programs now underway in P&S are described in Chapter 12.

Electives at P&S

The College of Physicians and Surgeons, through its affiliated hospitals (Bassett HealthCare, Harlem, Helen Hayes, New York-Presbyterian, Stamford and St. Luke’s-Roosevelt) offers in its Elective Catalog over 300 electives, covering an extraordinary range of areas in both research and clinical medicine.

Web address: http://cpmcnet.columbia.edu/dept/ps/electives

Preceptorships

An elective that has grown in popularity with P&S students is the preceptorship, a resurgence of the old apprentice system, whereby a student selects a preceptor in a given field and stays with that person throughout the working day and night, for an entire month. Currently more than four out of every five fourth year students select preceptorships for one or more months. Most of these preceptorships, some 150 months, are in clinical medicine; however, as many as 60 fourth year student-months are spent in research preceptorships.

Fellowship in Urban Medicine and Immigrant Health

Focusing on Manhattan’s lower east side, this fellowship, established by the Center for the Study of Society and Medicine at P&S, is designed to help future physicians understand the unique health care plight of immigrants; it encourages them to pursue careers in Primary Care.

Extramural Programs

Students may spend three months at extramural programs, that is, at Institutions not affiliated with the College of Physicians and Surgeons. Each year, approximately three out of every four P&S students take one or more electives away - at other U.S. medical schools and in countries throughout the world.