"[Y]ou'll have physicians that have no idea how insurance works."
With these words, Jeffrey Roberson, a former social worker who's now enrolled at Washington, D.C.-based George Washington University School of Medicine and Health Sciences, described the disparity between what's taught in medical school and what practicing medicine involves.
In many medical schools across the nation, students are being taught plenty about biology and anatomy, but not enough about public healthcare policy, according to NPR. But GWH's medical school has set out to change that.
More specifically, the medical school is seeking to integrate healthcare policy and practice into one solid curriculum. For example, in late May, the whole first-year class of students crafted proposals on how to best control childhood asthma in some of the D.C. area's low-income neighborhoods.
After an in-depth learning session on infectious diseases, another group of students came up with ideas on how to better implement AIDS and HIV policies into patients' everyday lives. And the medical students didn't just create proposals — they presented them to the national AIDS czar and other top officials at the White House.
"Clinicians today have to graduate being great providers of individual care," said Lawrence Deyton, MD, the school's senior associate dean for clinical public health, according to the report. "But they also have to recognize and be able to act on the fact that their patients, when they leave the clinic or leave the hospital, are going home [and] living in situations where there are all kinds of factors that promote and perpetuate chronic disease."
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