Doing it together
Nurses will have key role in new medical school

By Joan Tupponce

The fall of 2010 will mark a milestone for Southwest Virginia when the Virginia Tech Carilion School of Medicine welcomes its charter class.

“It’s predicted that the Virginia Tech Carilion School of Medicine and Research Institute (VTC) will bring many benefits to the community,” says Richard Vari, the school’s associate dean of medical education.

The new school will help enhance the health of local neighborhoods by making the area more attractive to doctors and other health-care professionals. “We are headed for a physician shortage in this country,” explains Larry Hincker, associate vice president for university relations at Virginia Tech. “This school will help address that shortage.”

According to the Association of American Medical Colleges, 30 million people are currently affected by physician shortages. Critical shortages are expected by 2020 unless medical school enrollment increases by 30 percent. With only half of U. S. medical schools even considering enrollment expansion, the AAMC concludes that new medical schools like the VTC must be created.

Gov. Timothy M. Kaine announced the creation of the VTC in January 2007. Virginia Tech and Carilion Clinic, one of Virginia’s largest health-care providers, are partnering to create the jointly operated private medical school. The school will be located in downtown Roanoke, adjacent to Carilion Roanoke Memorial Hospital.

VTC’s curriculum provides the necessary courses needed to earn an M.D. degree, including basic sciences and clinic sciences and skills. “Our students will also have in-depth course work in research principles, which will culminate with each student completing a research project before they graduate,” Vari says.

One of the unique aspects of the school is its emphasis on interprofessionalism within the curriculum. Medical students will be placed into teams composed of students from other health-care professions, including nursing. The teams will learn about a variety of issues such as teamwork, roles of the health professions, public health and public safety. They also will contribute together to a service learning project in the community.

“It is anticipated that by bringing these students together at an early stage of their training, continuing interprofessional experiences longitudinally through their education and extending them into practice, we will be creating a culture of cooperation and mutual respect among the various health-care professions,” Vari says.

Currently, the VTC is the only medical school in the country that will integrate interprofessionalism at a foundational level. The goal is to enhance the appreciation of all professions involved in health care, which in turn, will lead to improved patient care.

The new school will be patterned after Harvard Medical School’s Health Sciences and Technology program and Cleveland Clinic’s Lerner College of Medicine. It will feature small class sizes and be dedicated to training physician researchers. VTC will use a small-group, patient-centered case approach to structure the learning of the basic and clinical sciences.

“We have moved away from the traditional lecture format and have designed the program to include more discussion, critical thinking, hands-on laboratories and clinical skills sessions and simulation,” Vari says.

Each class will have 42 students and at full four-year enrollment, the school will have 168 students.
Nursing faculty from Jefferson College of Health Sciences and Carilion Clinic currently is, and will continue to be, involved in several aspects of the VTC curriculum. “This is a very exciting and innovative time for medical education as many institutions continue to explore the importance of interprofessionalism and its impact on health-care delivery,” Vita says. “Many changes are taking place making it difficult to predict where we will be in the future. However, the important role of nursing in medical education, as manifested at VTC and Carilion Clinic, is sure to provide opportunities for nurses to be involved in many areas.”

The campus setting will hold both the medical school and the Virginia Tech Carilion Research Institute. All students at the medical school will receive training in research methods and conduct original research at the Research Institute. “[It] will be a premier institute of interdisciplinary and translational research within the medical sciences,” says Vari. “It will facilitate discovery-based medical education and will work to sustain and strengthen the Virginia Tech-Carilion partnership as Carilion Clinic develops into a research-empowered provider of health-care services.”

Research conducted at the Institute may include professionals from the nursing community because of the strong focus on interdisciplinary processes. “We anticipate that there will be various opportunities to engage nurses in appropriately targeted research,” says Timothy A. Johnson, Ph.D., associate dean for research and professor and chair of basic sciences at the School of Medicine. “For example, any clinical trial that emerges from the Institute will most certainly have a nursing component, initially in identifying and consenting patients for the trial, record management and implementation of the clinical trial protocol. Our hope is that more substantive contributions from nurses will materialize as interprofessional research teams develop and begin interfacing with one another.”

Additionally, the Institute will help Virginia Tech expand important research programs, including bioinformatics, computer science and engineering, as well as epidemiology, health services, basic sciences and clinical research. The combination of a medical school and research institute on the campus of a major medical center will move Virginia Tech closer to its goal of becoming one of the country’s top 30 research universities.

Currently, the Medical School is under candidate status. The school hopes to receive preliminary accreditation in early June of this year. When up and running, the school, as well as the research institute, will not only bring health benefits to the community but also economic benefits.

“This will have a huge economic impact on the community,” Hincker says. “On the dollars and cents side, we have a goal to significantly expand research. That has an economic impact on the region such as hiring more researchers and building more buildings.”

This type of public/private partnership is important to bettering health care in the southwestern portion of Virginia. “Virginia Tech is a very powerful research and educational institution, and Carilion Clinic is an innovator in patient care and medical education, “Vari says. “This unique partnership capitalizes on these core competencies and creates a product that delivers an abundance of benefits to society.”