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 Launched
in 1999, the Health Fellows Program is an innovative academic
program offering Trinity students exceptional opportunities
to explore healthcare and to participate in a wide range of
healthcare-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.
The program is described below in an excerpt from the Trinity
College Bulletin and in an article on the program, which appeared
in the Trinity Reporter.
Program description
The Trinity College Health Fellows Program is designed
for undergraduates who wish to observe and participate in
a variety of health-related activities. These activities include
research projects, clinical services, educational seminars,
and rounds at Hartford Hospital, Institute of Living, and
Connecticut Children’s Medical Center. This program
will provide students with valuable experience in a healthcare
setting and may help guide future career choices. For
students interested in a career in medicine, medical colleges
are more commonly accepting only those students who have had
relevant experience. This type of intensive participation
would certainly make Trinity students stand out. For
students interested in a career in research, this program
would also make them much more desirable to graduate schools.
In addition, they will have learned important research skills,
both specific to the placement and more general, such as formulating
a hypothesis, methods of data collection, and methods of data
analysis.
Ordinarily, supervisors at the hospitals will be physicians.
Placements will be carefully screened to insure that they
will be rigorous while providing students with a stimulating
learning experience. All supervisors will be required to provide
opportunities to participate in research as well as to observe
clinical services. Supervisors will complete a questionnaire
which describes their requirements and the possible opportunities
at their placement. Each student and supervisor will be matched
appropriately.
In addition to working 30 hours per week for a professional
in the healthcare setting, each fellow will participate in
both a weekly seminar and a colloquium series, for which he
or she will receive three course credits. The seminar is valued
at one course credit and the clinical experience and colloquium
combined at two course credits. Separate grades will be given
for the seminar and the combination of clinical experience
and colloquium. In some cases one of these course credits
will count towards a major, but this is decided by the individual
major departments. Students will also take at least one other
course at Trinity.
The weekly seminar will cover general topics in health care,
including recent advances in research and clinical applications
of basic research. Readings will be assigned for a weekly
class discussion. Students will be required to make a class
presentation based on one of the topics covered in class that
is relevant to their hospital experience. Students will also
be required to complete a research paper on a topic from the
course and to complete three exams. For the colloquium series,
supervisors of the student fellows will be asked to give a
talk. They will provide appropriate readings to be completed
before the talk. The students will attend the talk and discuss
the findings as a group afterwards. As part of the site-based
experience, students will be required to keep a weekly journal
of experiences at the hospital and to present on one clinical
case, in the format of a Grand Rounds. They will also be required
to produce a written summary of the research they conducted.
As much as possible this will take the form of a scientific
journal article. This research will also be presented at the
Trinity College Science Symposium held each April.
Preference will be given to juniors and seniors, and it is
expected that students will have completed two laboratory
courses. Some placements will carry specific additional prerequisites.
The program will be limited to 15 students. It is strongly
recommended that "Medical Ethics" be taken either beforehand
or concurrent with the internship. Some background in science
will be strongly encouraged. Interested students should contact
the Health Fellows coordinator in September. Matches between
interested students and supervisors will be completed by November.
Students will begin work at the hospital with the start of
classes in January. Students who participate in their junior
year should bear in mind the option of remaining on site to
complete a senior thesis.
From the Trinity Reporter (Winter
2000)
Seeing health care in practice puts students on medical school
track
Health Fellows Program
By Leslie Virostek
 By
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 healthcare field. "The class
itself broadened our horizons," notes Sutula. "We talked a
lot about the healthcare 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 healthcare 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."
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