H E A L T H.  F E L L O W S.  P R O G R A M

The following feature story appeared in the campus publication MOSAIC in October, 1999.Although some of the courses, students, and faculty members referenced in the story may have changed in the meantime, it still provides a full and accurate picture of the Health Fellow Program. For the most current course information and faculty listing, we encourage you to visit the program's homepage.

SEEING HEALTH CARE IN PRACTICE PUTS STUDENTS ON MEDICAL SCHOOL TRACK

By the time Katherine E. Sutula ’00 completed the internship component of Trinity’s innovative Health Fellows program last spring, she knew that medical school would be in her future. Recalling her first day as an intern working on the Labor and Delivery Unit under the supervision of an obstetrician at Hartford Hospital, she says, "I saw two regular births and a C-section with twins. It was amazing!" She went on to observe dozens more births, surgeries, and other procedures. She also witnessed firsthand how doctors interacted with patients and conducted research of significance to patients and caregivers.

Such eye-opening practical learning experiences were the norm for the first nine students in the Health Fellows Program. The three-credit, spring-semester program, launched in 1999, combines 30 hours a week at Hartford Hospital, Connecticut Children’s Medical Center, or the Institute of Living with a weekly seminar class on issues in medicine and a colloquium series. Associate Professor of Psychology Sarah A. Raskin and Charles A. Dana Professor of Psychology and Director of the Neuroscience Program Priscilla Kehoe developed the program as an ideal way to provide a select group of students interested in the health field a unique educational opportunity to develop research skills and relevant practical experiences that would complement their classroom work and also guide their career choices.

According to Kehoe, "The Health Fellows Program gives students an opportunity to test the clinical waters, so to speak, while doing research and studying health issues. The program is intensive. Sixty percent of each student’s time in the clinical area is spent doing scientific research. They really get an idea about the logic behind using science methodology in the clinical realm, where it is difficult and hard to control. Nonetheless they do get a sense of the importance as well as pitfalls of such an endeavor."

Students also hone their communication skills with written assignments and learn to communicate with patients, patients’ families, and other health professionals, Kehoe says.

Real-world research

The Health Fellows Program’s rigorous requirements call for independent research to be conducted on-site at one of the three participating health centers -- all of them just a block or two away from Trinity’s campus -- and presented in a research paper. The first group of Health Fellows chose a wide range of topics for its work. David J. Miller ’01, an economics major, investigated Medicaid and the changing environment for pediatric care in Connecticut. Kevin T. Doyle, Jr. ’00, a neuroscience major, examined whether brief screening questionnaires are accurate predictors of depression in the elderly. Justin P. Lafreniere, a junior with a major in biology, worked in the neonatal intensive care unit at Connecticut Children’s Medical Center, where he studied the high incidence of false-positive results for cystic fibrosis among premature babies. He spent hours and hours poring over the inches-thick medical charts of 100 children with complicated medical histories. After painstakingly investigating a number of factors including birth defects, surgeries, and feeding protocols, Lafreniere uncovered a connection between a nutritional regimen often given to premature infants and the presence of the enzyme that produces the false-positive result.

A broader context

Back on campus, the Health Fellows’ weekly seminar class helped the students put their internship experiences into the larger context of the health-care field. "The class itself broadened our horizons," notes Sutula. "We talked a lot about the health-care system, technology applications and implications, the use of antibiotics, and ethics in medicine." Sutula found that the classroom discussions on ethics and the doctor-patient relationship were brought to life by what she observed in her internship. "I really gained an appreciation for good doctors," she says.

In class, students were each required to lead discussions and to make a case-study presentation to their peers, based on a medical situation they had witnessed in the field. On colloquium days, the physicians who supervised students for their internships came to class to discuss cutting-edge issues or controversies in medicine, including physician-assisted suicide, the interface of society with medicine in the case of silicone breast implants, and ethics and decisionmaking in neonatal intensive care. For Raskin, the complementary seminar and colloquium provided a mechanism "for all of the students to get some benefit from all of the internship placements rather than only learning their specialty. One positive surprise for me was the bonding — for lack of a better word — of the class. The students all became very connected to each other, visited each other on-site, and helped each other out."

Lasting impact

The semester-long program also connected students with the health-care community in Hartford, affording them opportunities to pursue other kinds of work or volunteer projects. After her term as a Health Fellow ended, Katie Sutula took a summer course to become a certified "doula," a caregiver trained to tend to a mother’s emotional needs during childbirth. It’s a way for her to continue her learning in the delivery room even as she applies to medical school to become an obstetrician.

Meanwhile, Sutula and two other students have had their research accepted at national professional conferences. Sutula’s abstract was submitted to the Annual Meeting of the Society for Maternal-Fetal Medicine to be held in Miami Beach in January. Doyle’s work was accepted for paper presentation at the 52nd Annual Scientific Meeting of the Gerontological Society of America in San Francisco. He is scheduled to be a copresenter at the Conference on Culture, Mental Health, and Aging at UMass-Boston in November. Earlier this month, Lafreniere traveled with his internship supervisor, Dr. Victor Herson, to Seattle, where they jointly gave a poster presentation at the 1999 North American Cystic Fibrosis Conference.

Several students will continue to work with their former supervisors to finalize papers to be published in national professional journals. Many of the former Health Fellows believe such accomplishments as undergraduates will make them especially attractive candidates for medical school or other graduate study.

The selection process for a new group of Health Fellows for spring semester 2000 is already underway. Kehoe contends that students who are selected to participate can expect to reap not only professional but personal rewards. "In general, both in the class and in the hospital the students gain an understanding of many issues: managed care, the state of health care, our ability to diagnose and treat various disorders, and the state of the ‘art’ versus ‘science’ in medicine today," she observes. "But this is also a chance for students to learn independence in terms of time management and work styles. They have to be disciplined to set their own hours in the hospital. For many, the Health Fellows Program provides the opportunity to see if this field is what they want to aim for professionally."

                                                                                                                                        -Leslie Virostek