Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai and The Ohio State University College of Medicine Resident Chapter receive Chapter Awards
Members of Icahn’s GHHS Chapter during a Solidarity Week event
Established Chapter Award
Icahn received the Established Chapter Award which was open to all chapters that were started at least three years ago. Over the past few years, Icahn has grown into an engaged and innovative chapter that aims to increase student interaction with patients to enhance care and improve student well being. Most notable has been their creation and commitment to what is now a Gold Foundation program called Tell Me More®. Started in 2014 by Icahn GHHS members, Tell Me More® is a simple program that asks patients to display answers to questions to help care teams get to know patients better as human beings. Icahn’s GHHS then continued the program in 2015 and 2016 during Solidarity Week, a nationwide movement to emphasize compassionate care. And, they have looked for ways to expand humanism actions beyond just Solidarity Day and make it a more regular occurrence in their training and practice. They’ve created “humanism one-liners” for each patient throughout the hospital, hosted Grand Round lectures and focused on narrative medicine to gain deeper knowledge of their patients. As one GHHS member said, “You can brighten someone’s day just by showing an interest in who they are as people…and it doesn’t even take that long to do, so there’s no excuse not to do it, even if you’re busy on wards!”
New Chapter Award
The Ohio State University College of Medicine Resident Chapter won for the New Chapter Award. This chapter was started in 2014, and have built their chapter on the philosophy that to better serve the patient they had to better serve the resident physician. To start, they created monthly gatherings as a “safe space” to discuss their professional and personal journeys. Meetings were structured to focus on topics and readings and members were assigned to lead discussion each month. What they found was that “The impact on the resident is also on the impact on the patient.” Regardless of the evening’s planned topics, members shared stories and sought advice on how best to care for their patients. The resident chapter at Ohio State has also joined forces with the student chapter there to serve as mentors and to evaluate the teaching environment.
The winners each received a $1000 prize and will be recognized at the GHHS National Conference in March 2017.
Other Outstanding Chapters:
Eastern Virginia Medical School
Jacobs School of Medicine and Biomedical Sciences at the University of Buffalo
University of Missouri-Kansas City School of Medicine
University of Washington School of Medicine
Wayne State University School of Medicine
