Welcome to the most recent edition of the “You said... We did...” newsletter! I am pleased to share updates about how we are responding to student suggestions for building an even more vibrant and enriching learning community for the MD Program at Yale School of Medicine (YSM).
We post past updates on the YSM LCME webpage, organized by topic.
Below is a list of the topics covered in this newsletter:
You have concerns about the adequacy of debt management counseling.
We did...
Our Financial Aid Office has organized workshops and one-on-one debt management sessions for students and also provides resources online. All first and fourth-year students with loans are required to have a one-on-one debt management session. Click “Read more” for information about upcoming opportunities—and we welcome suggestions for how we can provide additional support!
You were unsure how the medical school is handling reports of harassment, mistreatment, and bias.
We did...
In my January 12, 2023 You Said, We Did newsletter, I shared information about different ways to report mistreatment and what the school does when we receive such reports. We held an in-person Town Hall on the Learning Environment on the evening of March 8 for all interested students. I encourage you to watch the presentations from the Town Hall if you could not attend. Below are a few key points from the discussion.
Number and types of reports: During the Town Hall, I presented data on the number of MD Program harassment, mistreatment, and discrimination reports between 2017 and 2022 during clerkship rotations. As you can see in the video, OB/GYN and Surgery have the greatest number of reports. While some reports describe a student’s experience of being treated harshly by team members, many describe incidents of residents being treated poorly by attendings, bias in the treatment of patients by nurses and other staff, and students being harassed or treated disrespectfully by patients.
The majority of our work on these issues has been within these two departments. The chairs of both OB/GYN and Surgery have engaged the Office of Academic and Professional Development to help with individual faculty members, and Yale New Haven Health System is working with us to address potential bias within staff. All departments are now meeting with students regularly to discuss their experiences, and faculty, residents, and fellows have been actively engaged in discussions about how to improve the learning environment in clinical settings.
This work is extremely important and will be ongoing; we are actively working to develop better ways to communicate with students and trainees about how these incidents are being handled and how the learning environment is being monitored to measure improvement. To learn more, click “Read more.”
You are satisfied with access to service learning/community service opportunities.
We did...
We are pleased you feel positively about your access to service learning and community service opportunities. This is especially important, since increasing mutually constructive engagement with the wider community is an action item in the recently released Strategic Plan for Medical Education.
You currently find out about these opportunities through a number of channels, which is terrific. However we decided it was valuable to also centralize this information, and so added a sublink to the Special Programs & Student Opportunities page on the Medical Education website with information about Community Engagement Opportunities.
We welcome additional suggestions for content at this sublink!
You said...
The internet is not working well or consistently in the Harkness Building.
We did...
We have scheduled network upgrades for Harkness D (the building with Café Med and the dorms) on the nights of Tuesday, March 28 and Wednesday March 29 (6:00 p.m. – 2:00 a.m.). This is part of Yale’s Next Generation Network (NGN) transition project to upgrade network cables, wires, and ports to provide better, faster internet service to the buildings. There may be spotty internet access in the buildings the nights the work is being done, but it will be great to have improved internet when the upgrade is complete!
If you have questions or feedback about any of these updates, or the format of this newsletter or the webpage, please share your thoughts with me.
Sincerely,
Jessica Illuzzi, MD, MS
Deputy Dean for Education Harold W. Jockers Professor of Medical Education
