Education
“we are making the transition towards a system with more focus on prevention and population health, renewed interest in basic and general care, and bridging the gap between the medical and social domains”
Current health care systems struggle to cope with the most important health problems of the 21st century. Therefore, we are making the transition towards a system with more focus on prevention and population health and bridging the gap between the medical and social domains. This will support the participation and inclusion of patients of all kind in a diverse society.
The Education and Training section of our department aims to prepare future physicians for their tasks in a changing health care environment. We provide education in population health aspects (e.g. social determinants of health, prevention, health care efficiency) and training in preventative, collaborative and sociomedical skills (e.g. health education, vaccination, screening, shared decision making, team collaboration and occupational and community medicine). We develop and implement novel teaching methods, including blended, experiential, and community service learning.
Highlights
Into the Neighborhood
Together with Erasmus School of Health Policy and Management (ESHPM) , our department offers third-year students from all (EUR) faculties a 10-week minor Public health: the healthy big city. As part of a Center for Learning and Innovation (CLI) fellowship a new group assignment has been developed for this minor, which was completed in the autumn of 2021 by 48 students from various disciplines (e.g. health sciences, medicine, public administration, psychology). In this assignment, groups of 5-6 students had to go into a Rotterdam neighborhood to gain insight into neighborhood activities, local care networks and social determinants of health. They had to organize a neighborhood activity themselves and make a mini-documentary using data about the neighborhood and interviews with social or health care workers and local residents. In this context, walking groups were organized and work was done on creating 'blue zones' in a Rotterdam neighborhood. The students were very positive about this new assignment ( “you learn what really happens in a neighborhood' 'you do something for someone else' 'useful to learn how to deal with different people' 'proud of our end product' ) , which also led to an improvement of their social engagement as measured with the “Civic Engagement Scale'.
Socially engaged physicians
According to Erasmus MC's educational vision students should be formed into socially engaged physicians. To stimulate this, our department implemented community projects in the curriculum in 2012 already, in which groups (n=6) third-year students work on a question from an external stakeholder (i.e. service learning).
To improve the learning effects of this education, an innovation (Hoka) project was carried out in the form of two pilots with participation of 71 students. In these pilots, the intensity of the supervision was increased by transferring part of this to senior students, accompanying education was developed, and the time period to work on the project was extended.
Students, teachers and stakeholders were very positive about the new approach and we could release a report with recommendations about the best possible model of project education in the current and future curriculum. Amongst others we recommend to make structural use of student counselors, to select projects only with enough community exposure, and to train the students in handling data, conducting interviews, analyzing qualitative and quantitative data, and scientific writing.
