HJBR May/Jun 2019

Q&A 34 MAY / JUN 2019 I  Healthcare Journal of BATON ROUGE   How has the role of medical education changed over the years? Is it more of a team-model approach? Medicine is delivered much more in a team based approach now versus a decade ago, and particularly compared to two decades ago. Medical education doesn’t necessarily follow quite as rapidly as the practice of medicine does, so you have to adjust education as you go. Medical educa- tion has adjusted accordingly with a lot of medical education now being delivered in a team based approach. One of the ways that you do this, even in the first year of medi- cal school, is to have the students work in teams, which most of the students do very well in, and I think they enjoy it. The ben- efit is that it gets them to recognize early on that they are not going to do everything alone; they are going to be working as part of a team. Now again, it’s not quite so easy to replicate the team they might work with in their future practices. That comes with time as they get closer to the type of medi- cine they will practice. How does a medical education fromTulane differ from other medical schools? Medical schools in general have more features in common than they have differ- ences. We have some unique things—we do more community based education and clin- ics thanmany medical schools, so I think we are really well known for that. We are used to giving more attention to the individual students than some schools do. I think those would be some of the unique things where Tulane differs from some other schools. Our curriculum is a pretty traditional curricu- lum, though it’s more and more integrated around organ systems. For example, when you’re studying the heart, you’re studying the pharmacology or drugs, the pathology, and the physiology. You study all of that together rather than in separate courses. How would you characterize the rela- tionship between the medical school and Tulane Hospital? It’s very tight. Tulane Hospital is partly owned by Tulane University and it’s one of three main sites of education along with the VA and UMC, which are close behind in the amount of education we deliver. We also have significant collaboration with Chil- dren’s Hospital and Ochsner for education. We collaborate with Children's Hospital on pediatrics, and with Ochsner we collabo- rate on pediatrics, ENT, and neurosurgery, in particular. There are other smaller collabo- rations, but those are the big ones. Are most of your graduates staying in Lou- isiana? Is that a goal? That is not an explicit goal. Many of our students come from around the country and go to other places throughout the country for their residency, but we also have a lot of graduates of other medical schools that come to Tulane for residencies and fellow- ships. Most tend to practice close to where they do their residency, more so than where they go to medical school. There is a lot of coming and going, so we do end up supply- ing a lot of physicians to the New Orleans region and Louisiana. Is there an advantage to having a strong public health program, which Tulane is also known for? The school of public health is a separate part of the university but it is in close physi- cal proximity, and we do a lot of collabora- tive things. We have a really extraordinary school of public health. About 20-25 percent of our students get a Master of Public Health while getting their medical degree, and that is a real attraction to many students. They are able to get both degrees and learn a vari- ety of aspects of public health. We collabo- rate a lot with the school of public health in research as well. Which specialties are increasing/decreas- ing in market place demand? More heart surgery cases are being done non-surgically with cardiologists, as an example of something that is changing rel- atively rapidly. Oncology cancer treatment is changing very rapidly, and we take very much a team based approach with oncol- ogists, surgeons, radiation therapy, and pathologists, all working together daily. Academic medical centers like Tulane are often on the cutting edge of how practices change, but also, some of the physicians in private practice frequently lead to changes. Is there much of a relationship between the LSU and Tulane programs? Are there any shared resources or programs? We collaborate on a reasonable amount of research, we work together in the LCRC, and we share a lot of services at UMC. “Tulane Hospital is partly owned by Tulane University and it’s one of three main sites of education along with the VA and UMC, which are close behind in the amount of education we deliver.”