y the
time Katherine E. Sutula '00 (seen right with Dr. Joseph Wax at Hartford Hospital)
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 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
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 students 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, (seen
on the left with Dr. Victor Herson) 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 decision making 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 mothers 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 that was held in Miami Beach in January. Doyle's work
was accepted for paper presentation at the 52d Annual Scientific Meeting of the
Gerontological Society of America in San Francisco. He was a co-presenter at the
Conference on Culture, Mental Health, and Aging at UMass-Boston in November. Last October,
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 the current group of Health Fellows began early last
semester. Kehoe contends that students who are selected to participate can expect to reap
not only professional but also 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."
Launched in 1999, the Health Fellows Program is an innovative
academic program offering Trinity students exceptional opportunities to explore
health-care and to participate in a wide range of health-care-related activities. In
addition to their regular coursework, students in the program work 30 hours per week with
clinical-care physicians in one-on-one relationships at area medical centers.
Students combine challenging course work with rigorous on-site scientific research.