First-year medical students at Weill Cornell Medicine-Qatar (WCM-Q) visited the HMC Heart Hospital to perform cardiac examinations on patients.
WCM-Q’s innovative new curriculum has been designed to give students opportunities to interact with real patients under careful supervision almost from the beginning of their training, in contrast with traditional programmes, which leave this to the later stages.
A key element of providing early clinical experiences is WCM-Q’s strong collaborative relationship with Hamad Medical Corporation (HMC), where WCM-Q students take many of their clinical rotations, in which they spend time learning with experienced and gifted HMC physicians in many different hospital departments.
This year’s cohort of first-year WCM-Q students are the first to experience the new curriculum, which was launched in September last year. The visit to Hamad Medical Corporation’s Heart Hospital now forms part of the Health, Illness and Disease Course that WCM-Q students take in the second semester of the first-year of the medical programme. Working closely with HMC is crucial for providing WCM-Q students with world-class training to enable them to become the next generation of doctors serving the community of Qatar and beyond.
During the one-day visit, 38 students worked in pairs to meet with a patient, take their medical history and then perform a clinical cardiac examination. This entailed taking the patients’ pulse, using the stethoscope to listen to their breathing and heartbeat, and then taking a blood pressure measurement. They then wrote up their notes and presented the case to a senior HMC cardiologist.
Dr Liam Fernyhough, assistant professor of medicine at WCM-Q, accompanied the students to the hospital to guide the learning experience and supervise the examinations.
“One of the key strengths of the new curriculum is that it maximises the amount of time the students have to develop core clinical skills and helps to make the material they have been learning in the classroom relevant and memorable. This not only makes for extremely effective learning experiences but also gives the students a great boost in morale,” he said.
WCM-Q offers an integrated six-year medical programme consisting of a two-year premedical curriculum and a four-year medical curriculum. Students who successfully complete the programme are awarded a fully US-accredited MD degree.