Enacting the Behavioral and Social Sciences in the Clinical Setting: Institution-Wide Teaching of Effective Team-Based Patient Care

College of Physicians and Surgeons of Columbia University and Weill-Cornell Medical College

The R25 successor to Columbia's K07 project continues the effort to strengthen the teaching of social sciences and behavioral sciences in the medical school by emphasizing the roles of the teaching hospitals and the entire health care team in our teaching. The NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital, the major teaching hospital of the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Columbia University (P&S), will become our sphere of action. Since NewYork-Presbyterian is the main teaching site for two medical schools, Columbia's P&S and Weill Cornell Medical College, we expand our project to include Weill Cornell as our partner. Together, Columbia and Cornell can try to shape the clinical training our students derive in our shared hospital and to help our students to learn more effectively about the social and behavioral aspects of illness from their training in it. The first four specific aims outlined below cohere conceptually and, eventually, will in practice merge. The primacy of the power of stories in education and the influence of narrative actions on learning will continue to guide and unify our work. Conceptual frameworks from marrative medicine, reflective practice, and relationship-centered care will support our work toward all specific aims, and the narrative methods and metrics developed during K07 will be used in our work.

1. To develop a teaching and faculty-development partnership between the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Columbia University and the Weill Cornell Medical College as the two parent academic centers for the NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital.

2. To build the Faculty Scholarship Core at Columbia as the post-K07 stage of faculty development seminar to mature faculty members' research, scholarship, and publication in the teaching of social science and behavioral science to medical students and to enable them to achieve academic promotion on the basis of this work.

3. To enhance social sciences and behavioral sciences teaching to medical students in the hospital and ambulatory clinical settings at Columbia and Cornell, using and testing innovative methods from narrative medicine, reflective practice, and relationship-centered care.

4. Toward Specific Aim 2, to engage medical students in the institutional culture of NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital that emphasizes collaborative team-work and integrated patient-centered care and to participate in clinical and educational innovations that forward these aims, strengthening synergies with on-going institution-wide projects committed to these goals.