Year 4 Public Health Electives
The University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health continues to transform medical education by integrating public health into the four-year curriculum.
Several outstanding and wide-ranging fourth-year experiences have been developed and will be continued or piloted in the 2012-2013 academic year. These elective courses will allow students to explore issues in public health and how public health practice can be integrated with traditional clinical care. They have been designed to include interactive teaching sessions with clinical and/or community-based activities.
Explore these courses below, then register via OASIS!
- Ethical Issues in Population Health
- Injury Prevention
- Leadership to Improve Quality Health Care
- Maternal Child Health in Milwaukee
- Multidisciplinary Approaches to Colon Cancer Prevention and Treatment
- Optimizing Value, Quality and Safety in Health Care: A Case Study in Surgery
- Prevention, Organizations and Teamwork for Effective Care Transitions
- Primary Care and Public Health in Milwaukee
- Public Health Advocacy and Service in Psychiatry
- Smoking Cessation: Putting Evidence into Practice
- Surgery for the Non-Surgeon: Public Health Perspectives
- The Economic Approach to Clinical and Health Policy
452-730 Ethical Issues in Population Health
| Credits: 2 credits |
| Available: January |
| Location: Madison |
| Directors: Norman Fost, MD, MPH; Paul Kelleher, PhD |
This course will explore central ethical issues in public health and health policy in eight interactive discussion sessions of 1.5 hours each over a 4-week period. Course topics will include:
- Alternative approaches to rationing health care (triage and policy levels) and their relative merits
- The shape of rights to health and health care
- Measuring health states to determine the effectiveness of public health interventions (QALYs and DALYs)
- Paternalism and personal responsibility for risky health behaviors
- Determinants of health, including the effects of income inequality and relative social status ("The Status Syndrome")
- The role of genetic predisposition in allocating resources
- Distinctions between positive rights (entitlements) and negative rights (immunities) and their implication for public health policy
- Duties to future generations
- And more!
370-919a Primary Care and Public Health in Milwaukee
| Credits: 4 credits |
| Available: August-November; February-April |
| Location: Milwaukee |
| Directors: John Brill, MD, MPH; Paul Hunter, MD; Tito Izard, MD; Madelaine Tully, MD |
Students will work with clinicians and public health department staff in Milwaukee to explore the interconnections between family medicine and public health. Students will work directly with public health-oriented clinicians in community health centers and educational programs, observe and perform in health department infectious disease and preventive services areas, and complete a project with the Associate Medical Director of the Milwaukee Health Department.
936-919b Injury Prevention
| Credits: 4 credits (this elective will satisfy the fourth-year four-week surgery requirement) |
| Available: February |
| Location: Online course and project |
| Director: Ann O'Rourke, MD, MPH |
The course includes significant distance learning and is open to students across the state. The course will include assigned readings, completion of an on-line curriculum from TEACH-VIP (Training, Educating, and Advancing Collaboration in Health on Violence and Injury Prevention), participation in on-line discussions, and short assignments. Students will work on original or ongoing injury prevention projects.
436-919b Leadership to Improve Quality Health Care
| Credits: 2 credits |
| Available: Any session except October-November |
| Location: Milwaukee (Aurora Sinai) |
| Director: Carla Kelly, DO |
Students will work with clinical faculty and leaders in quality care management to explore and assess the health of the metro Milwaukee patient population as it relates to chronic disease and prevention. This two-week course will engage the student in the many aspects of quality and health care management through meetings with leaders in Aurora Health Care quality programs, site visits to a spectrum of clinical practice models participating in care management, and use of online programs, independent reading and reflection.
436-919c Maternal Child Health in Milwaukee
| Credits: 4 credits |
| Available: July-May |
| Location: Milwaukee |
| Directors: Kim Puterbaugh, MD; Paul Hunter, MD; John Brill, MD, MPH |
Students will work with clinical faculty and Milwaukee Health Department staff to explore determinants of Maternal-Child Health in Milwaukee. Students will participate in a variety of settings including WIC clinic, Milwaukee Health Department STI clinic, Birth to 3 Program, Neonatology and Labor and Delivery. Students will make a home visit to an expectant mother through the Prenatal Care Coordination program and will participate in a public health project with the Milwaukee Health Department.
936-919e Multidisciplinary Approaches to Colon Cancer Prevention and Treatment
| Credits: 4 credits (this elective will satisfy the fourth-year four-week surgery requirement) |
| Available: November-December; January-February |
| Location: Madison |
| Director: Gregory Kennedy, MD, PhD |
The reasons behind the failure of colorectal cancer screening programs are many and complex. The proposed course will explore the reasons behind these failures as well as teach the students the standard of care for prevention, diagnosis, and treatment of colorectal cancer. We will expose students to all facets of the disease and actively engage them in dialogue to improve screening programs for colorectal cancer.
Through this broad exposure, the student will identify methods to improve medical care and population health. By working with the various members of the health care team involved in treating colorectal cancer, the student will see the public health role of physicians across all specialties including engagement in health policy, advocacy, prevention and health promotion.
936-919d Optimizing Value, Quality and Safety in Health Care: A Case Study in Surgery
| Credits: 4 credits (this elective will satisfy the fourth-year four-week surgery requirement) |
|
Available: November, December and January |
| Location: Madison |
| Directors: Gretchen Schwarze, MD, MS; Caprice Greenberg, MD |
It is well-documented that the majority of adverse events experienced by hospitalized patients occur in surgery. Furthermore, surgical interventions account for a significant proportion of our nation's health care spending. For these reasons, surgery offers the ideal setting to explore these three components critical to improving the US healthcare system, namely value, quality and safety. This course provides an opportunity to examine factors that influence the care we provide and to critically consider the value (defined as outcome over spending) of this care. Value in health care can be decreased either by poor outcomes or by high costs. As such, efforts to improve value in surgery focus on quality, safety and appropriate utilization of critical resources. Within the department of surgery we have numerous opportunities to see these efforts in action and consider areas for improvement.
Students will follow patients longitudinally from clinic to discharge (including rehabilitation and home health care) and consider how these important concepts are encountered and impact care in the clinical arena. The overall strategy for this clerkship is to offer students an opportunity to follow four to six patients from the clinic, to the operating room and through their postoperative course. In addition there will be lectures, discussion groups and an assignment to write one independent narrative paper that presents a specific concept and the implications of policy or strategies to improve value in healthcare spending for the surgical patient. The concepts covered in this course will be generalizable to other disciplines.
632-919b Prevention, Organizations and Teamwork for Effective Care Transitions
| Credits: 4 credits |
| Available: September-November; January-April |
| Location: Madison |
| Director: Steve Barczi, MD |
This elective will educate students in evidence-based practices to improve the care of older adults in an inpatient setting and to enhance patient safety during their transition from the hospital to different community settings of care. Students will learn clinical skills and study systems issues that influence care outcomes across these different systems of care.
Time will be divided between the Acute Care for Elders inpatient team at the UWHC, the VA and UWHC Transitional Care programs, and several community-based settings that emphasize safe aging and injury prevention. The community experiences include post-discharge home visits, observation of health risk appraisals conducted at Oakwood Village, an area retirement community, and involvement in the United Way of Dane County's Safe and Healthy Aging Initiative.
814-919a Public Health Advocacy and Service in Psychiatry
| Credits: 2 credits |
| Available: Throughout the year |
| Location: Madison |
| Director: Claudia Reardon, MD |
The student will participate in a unique set of experiences that will expose him/her to a number of community resources and organizations involved in mental health advocacy and service. The student will receive advocacy and media training from the Wisconsin Medical Society and will use this preparation to make legislative visits and record a public service announcement (PSA) on a mental health topic. The student will also participate in meetings of several local professional advocacy groups, including the National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI).
In addition, the student will spend time in several mental health settings, including the Latina Mental Health Clinic at Dane County Mental Health Center; Yahara House (an evidence-based community treatment program in Madison); and the Program of Assertive Community Treatment (PACT), an interdisciplinary care-management approach to patients with severe mental illness, which originated in Madison and has been replicated worldwide.
632-917 Smoking Cessation: Putting Evidence into Practice
| Credits: 2 credits |
| Available: |
| Location: Madison |
| Directors: Jessica Cook, PhD; Megan Piper, PhD |
This course will train future physicians to use evidence-based smoking cessation treatments and to understand smoking cessation research so that they will be able to use such evidence throughout their careers. Students will practice skills in smoking cessation intervention and will observe and then co-facilitate smoking cessation therapy sessions. A special emphasis will be placed on underserved and specific subgroups of smokers (e.g., low-income, racial minorities, mental health status).
936-926 Surgery for the Non-Surgeon: Public Health Perspectives
| Credits: 4 credits (this elective will satisfy the fourth-year four-week surgery requirement) |
| Available: October-November; January-April |
| Location: Madison |
| Directors: Lou Bernhardt, MD; David Melnick, MD, MPH; Heather Neuman, MD, MPH; Rebecca Sippel, MD |
This four-week elective will combine both clinical education in the care of the individual patient, with emphasis on information applicable to the student not planning to complete a surgical residency, along with a strong public health component to give the student valuable insight into issues of public health that are central to the patients seen in the surgical clinic.
Students will spend time in a variety of surgical clinics and at HospiceCare. They will also participate in discussions and experiential learning exercises that integrate public health themes such as prevention/screening, access to surgical care, health care disparities and end-of-life care.
810-990 Research (The Economic Approach to Clinical and Health Policy)
| Credits: 2 credits |
| Available: February |
| Location: Online course |
| Directors: John Mullahy, PhD |
Through weekly readings, brief essays, reflections, and active online discussions, students will gain a fundamental appreciation of the economic dimensions of the central clinical and health policy problems they will encounter in their practice and research settings. Prior study in economics not required or assumed.
Major topics:
- The "production" of health
- The role of medical care and disparities in health outcomes
- Comparative effectiveness and the evaluation of health care interventions
- Health insurance, access to care and health
- Provider reimbursement and provider incentives