Description
- Abstract:
- Inpatient hospitalization can be a stressful and dehumanizing experience. While empathy can positively impact the patient experience, medical education has in contrast been shown to reduce empathy across years. A volunteer service was created in conjunction with the Gold Humanism Honor Society to address this problem with hopes to both improve patient experience and emphasize the importance of humanism early in medical education. The service, entitled Brown Students at the Bedside, recruits medical student volunteers to provide company to patients with limited social support as identified by their medical team. Student volunteers respond to referrals made by providers by attending to the patient in the form of company, spending approximately one hour with the patient. The primary study aim is to assess the impact of this service on the patient’s experience of inpatient hospitalization. Our hypothesis is the increase in social support via medical student interaction improves the patient’s experience of inpatient hospitalization. Evidence that was gathered through student summaries of the patient interactions support this hypothesis. This project seeks to test this hypothesis by surveying patients. They will be recruited to complete the survey after referral from their medical team to the service. The secondary study aim is to evaluate the impact of the program on the medical student volunteers. We hypothesize that medical students feel positively about their interpersonal involvement with patients and that it helps maintain empathy. Data compiled from similar programs that aim to increase medical student empathy at other academic medical centers support this hypothesis. A survey specific to the program as well as the validated tool, the Jefferson Scale of Empathy, will be disseminated to students at regular intervals to assess their experience with the program. This data will be collected over 15 months as the program runs in two Lifespan hospitals with the goal of collecting 40 patient and 60 student surveys.
- Notes:
- Scholarly concentration: Non-Scholarly Concentrator
Access Conditions
- Use and Reproduction
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- Rights
- In Copyright
- Restrictions on Use
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Citation
van Deventer, Ella BA, Kraft, Daniel BA, Pan, Kelly BS, et al.,
"Brown Students at the Bedside: implementation and evaluation of a pilot volunteer program to improve social support in the inpatient setting"
(2021).
Warren Alpert Medical School Academic Symposium.
Brown Digital Repository. Brown University Library.
https://repository.library.brown.edu/studio/item/bdr:2a6pgyc5/
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Warren Alpert Medical School Academic Symposium
The Warren Alpert Medical School Academic Symposium is an annual event at Warren Alpert Medical School of Brown University that provides Year II medical students a venue to present their summer research in a poster format. Participation in the Symposium …...