The Department of Family Medicine’s (DFM) Office of Medical Student Education is bustling under the leadership of Acting Director Jacob Prunuske, MD, MSPH. Over the past six months, the predoc program has seen a surge of new accomplishments, including:

• The creation of a Master Teacher fellowship, which so far has trained three community faculty to provide small-group teaching in medical students’ third-year clerkship;
  
  
• National recognition and a $100 award from the American Academy of Family Physicians for increasing the number of students in the School of Medicine and Public Health’s (SMPH) Family Medicine Interest Group (FMIG) by 27 percent;
  
  
• First-time participation in Operation Education, a Wisconsin Medical Alumni Association event in which medical students can meet residents and faculty from a variety of specialties, including family medicine;
  
  
• Teaching suturing, splinting, obstetric interventions, and other procedures performed by family medicine physicians to nearly 70 medical students at March’s Medical Student Procedures Workshop, an event sponsored and coordinated by the DFM;
  
  
• The appointment of DFM faculty member James Shropshire, MD, as director of the SMPH’s Patient, Doctor, and Society course;
  
  
• Three presentations at the Society of Teachers of Family Medicine 2008 Predoctoral Education Conference:
  • the Master Teacher fellowship described above;
  • a model for teaching how to interact with patients when using electronic medical records; and
  • a college health rotation curriculum.

These activities demonstrate a renewed commitment to advancing medical student education at the DFM. “We are part of a huge, phenomenal department, and I think with the right outlook and allocation of resources, we can truly become one of the best [predoc] programs in the country,” Prunuske said.

Prunuske, who became acting director in the summer of 2007, has been surveying program and course directors to determine how to create a predoc program of excellence.

He is also beginning the process of formally evaluating the department’s clinical electives, an effort that will continue as the program recruits a permanent director.

In addition, Prunuske is part of an SMPH committee to evaluate the overall third- and fourth-year medical student curriculum. “We have the opportunity to lead the charge at the SMPH as it transforms to a school of medicine and public health,” he said. “It’s going to take time, but over the next several years we can help strengthen both medical student education and our department within the SMPH.”