Getting the patient's perspective

Penn Medical student Scott Caesar will eat grits for breakfast this week with Ida Morris, a West Philadelphia resident in her eighties.

Caesar met Morris through a Penn program that partners teams of two medical students with a chronically ill patient.

The program, Longitudinal Experience to Appreciate Patient Perspective, which is mandatory for all Med students, assigns future doctors to a patient during their first month at School of Medicine. Students will follow their patients for three years.

While similar programs at other schools pair students with patients for only a brief period, Penn's program is intended to allow students to better grasp how patients cope with chronic illness over time.

Medical School professor Paul Lanken, the program's director, said that it is designed to "help the students learn how [patients] live and deal with the social, psychological and family issues" that are part of coping with a chronic disease.

"We don't have a good mechanism to teach chronic disease because the students really don't see patients over time," he said.

Students in the current first-year class, the third to participate in the program, are the first to be paired with a patient from their first month on campus until the end of their third year.

In previous years, students received their matches in their second semester.

The students aren't supposed to treat their patients, but rather learn how to relate to them.

"As first years, we don't really know anything," Caesar said. "Even though we're not [Morris'] doctors, we sit there and we listen."

That doesn't mean patients in the program don't benefit from it, though.

Morris said the good feeling that comes with volunteering makes the program worthwhile.

Caesar agreed that his involvement makes a difference.

"We're other people trying to treat her, even though it's not medically," he said.

Not all students' experiences are positive, however, and relationships can be difficult to maintain due to scheduling conflicts, Lanken said.

But to minimize problems, the program tries to stay centralized in West Philadelphia, which is where one-third of the patients live.

"We try to put a one-hour limit on distance," Lanken said.

Caesar agreed on the importance of local ties in fostering better doctor-patient relations.

"In the West Philly community it shows that Penn wants to create doctors that understand where patients are really coming from," he said.

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