The nation's second largest medical school, which this year will graduate its first class trained to link competency, professionalism, ethics and life long learning, will serve as a laboratory for the study of relationship-centered medical care. The IU and Regenstrief researchers will investigate how relationship-centered care -- which brings physicians' relationships with their patients, their patients' families, other caregivers, and communities into play -- can be incorporated in a medical school curriculum and post-medical school training thereby influencing the way future physicians practice medicine. The researchers also will conduct investigational studies on relationship-centered care itself.
Over the next three years, they will look at how to train future physicians to focus on these interpersonal interactions, to provide care in a fashion that expresses the same principles as the old fashioned bedside manner of simpler times when physicians were not pressured to see patients in a short period of time. They also plan to teach medical students how this compassionate care can be practiced by physicians in the competitive health care environment of the twenty-first century.
In addition to working with medical students, residents and fellows, the IU and Regenstrief investigators will develop a body of research to shed light on what clinicians and patients are actually doing, thinking and feeling as they interact.
Thomas S. Inui, Sc.M., M.D, associate dean for health care research, and the Sam Regenstrief Professor of Health Services Research at the Indiana University School of Medicine and president and chief executive officer of Regenstrief Institute Inc., will lead the project over a three-year period. Dr. Inui believes that "meaningful relationships in health care were never more important than they are today. Effective health care is built on a foundation of trust and collaboration, not only on the basis of technical expertise." Dr. Inui also sits on an Institute of Medicine committee that is studying relationship-centered care. The IOM is a part of the National Academies of Science.
"Relationship-centered care means that we have to think a little bit differently about how we approach patients, how we approach health care colleagues, and how we approach our students. Quality health care and quality medical education are all about quality relations with one another," said Stephen Leapman, M.D., executive associate dean for educational affairs at the IU School of Medicine.
The Fetzer Institute is a private operating foundation based in Kalamazoo, Mich. that supports research, education, and service programs exploring the integral relationships among body, mind, and spirit. "Movement in the direction of relationship-centered care in the life world of academic medicine would be galvanized if even one medical school/academic medical center could seriously undertake this kind of change process, document its journey, share perspectives with peer schools, and measure the impact of what it has done on the members of the academic community viewed broadly. We propose to take that journey at the Indiana University School of Medicine," said David Sluyter of Fetzer.