EDUCATING
Video courtesy of Arizona Public Media
The Societies Program of ArizonaMed: Putting Patients First
The focus is on clinical experience and the patient-doctor relationship in the new curriculum at the UA College of Medicine.
Video courtesy of Arizona Public Media
The Video Slam Project
"Patients as Teachers, Medical Students as Filmmakers," or the "Video Slam Project," is an elective video project developed by the Medical Humanities Program at The University of Arizona College of Medicine.
Dan Shapiro, PhD, associate professor of clinical psychiatry at the UA and director of the humanism thread of the College of Medicine curriculum, ArizonaMed, describes the Video Slam Project as the first of its kind offered in a U.S. medical college. For this project, second-year UA medical students visited patients with chronic illnesses in their homes over a period of eight months and produced documentaries about their lives. The result is four short (7-10-minute) films about the lives of individuals coping with head injury, cancer, diabetes and AIDS. Individually compelling, they will be shown altogether as part of the Life Cycle block in the 2007-08 curriculum.
"Medical training historically has focused on acute illness, and many physicians have complained that they feel ill-equipped to meet the needs of their chronically ill patients. This project is an efficient tool for teaching medical trainees what patients' lives are really like," says Dr. Shapiro.