S T A N F O R D M E D I C I N E

Volume 17 Number 3 FALL 2000


On the Cover

Admitting Women to Medical School for More than a Century. 

Cover illustration by Janet Woolley.

Stanford Medicine, published quarterly by Stanford University Medical Center, aims to keep readers informed about the education, research, clinical care and other goings on at the Medical Center.

 

 

For the special section for Alumni, click on the link below:
STANFORD
MD

 

Dear Friends,

AS MANY OF YOU KNOW, WE AT THE SCHOOL OF MEDICINE have embarked on an ambitious project to overhaul the school's facilities. Over the next four years, renovation and new construction will give rise to the modern teaching, research and administrative infrastructure we need to continue to excel as a medical school and as a research center. * What you may not know is that we are planning another project of great magnitude: To overhaul the nature of what takes place within our facilities. We expect to have a new education program ready for our students by the start of the 2002 school year. * The seeds of the initiative to revamp our curriculum were planted nearly two years ago at a School of Medicine retreat. At that retreat, faculty and students agreed on the necessity of updating the teaching program, focusing on the tools and information students will need to practice first-class medicine in the decades ahead.

In the year following the retreat, we began to make progress on some aspects of the reform project. One example of this is a program expansion launched by our senior associate dean for education, Phyllis Gardner, MD, to help focus our curriculum more on the development of critical-thinking skills and deep scholarship and less on fact-based learning -- a goal identified by the retreat participants. Toward that goal, Dr. Gardner proposed that our Medical Scholars Program be broadened to support an extra year in a scholarly endeavor. This expanded program, which is now being implemented, can include a year spent in bioengineering, basic science, clinical research, the arts and humanities or public service, with students earning a second degree for their work.

Another example of progress is our effort to answer retreat participants' call for a required core curriculum for graduate students, which would provide a common body of knowledge and bring together the dispersed graduate community. In response, the Committee on Graduate Admissions and Policy has developed and begun offering a pilot program, consisting of six core courses.

But our efforts to address curriculum reform for all School of Medicine students began in earnest last year with the formation of a steering committee of 15 faculty members from the basic and clinical sciences to guide the initiative. Working together, the steering committee, administration and the School of Medicine's Faculty Senate have begun to focus attention on the real nitty-gritty of curriculum reform.

The biggest task ahead involves simplifying the pre-clinical and clinical core curricula with an eye to eliminating the course redundancies and overlaps that now exist. Another goal is to integrate the basic science and clinical experiences through case-based learning and other methods.

Recent meetings of the Faculty Senate have been dominated by our efforts to accomplish these objectives. Foremost in our minds is our desire to streamline and modernize our curriculum without jeopardizing the integrity of our traditions -- in particular the tradition of flexibility for which our school is so well-known. It is exciting to participate in these discussions and witness our faculty's creativity and wisdom as they reach for solutions.

We are in agreement on our goals, but how do we get there? We ask for your patience -- and your ideas -- as we work toward answering this question.

 

Cordially yours,

EUGENE A. BAUER, MD

Vice President for Medical Affairs

Dean, Stanford University School of Medicine