By EWA MATUSZEWSKI
In the waning days of summer, I allow myself to meander at bit, including in my columns.
First off is an issue that has a bit of a back to school connection, and that is that primary care physician practices and their teams should be incubators for future physicians. While training in an ambulatory setting is preferable to a hospital setting, such an environment generally doesn’t reflect the value of the ongoing relationship that is developed between the PCP and patient—a relationship that can reinforce healthy behaviors and provide health strategies that help prevent or manage chronic conditions and co-morbidities.
When residents are trained day in and day out in this setting, they are also afforded a unique mentoring experience, with “teacher” and “student” not only jointly providing care, but with the resident learning communication (listening) skills with the patient and the patient’s family from the physician mentor. Such practice-based training is also imperative for population health, with residents seeing patients in their medical home, rather than in acute situations in a hospital setting.
Now I want to revisit a training approach that does not take place in a physician’s office, or even a traditional health setting, but is primary care training, nonetheless. I think it merits attention here because it is such an impactful and humane program.
Wayne State University has a Street Medicine Detroit program started in 2012 that does outreach to the homeless population in the community. Open to MD and DO medical students regardless of their future specializations, it is a primary care initiative meeting the underserved physical and psychosocial needs of the homeless on the streets and in shelters and soup kitchens. While providing care and learning about healthcare in the real world, the program also reinforces to medical students the humanity of all patient populations, not to mention the need for solutions to the country’s growing number of homeless adults and children.
Were programs such as this to be implemented more widely, with care offered at permanent sites, this approach would have even greater impact on even more patients—and more primary care learning opportunities for residents. I know, there’s a not-so-small matter of funding that limits such city-based care…in the meantime, hats off to WSU for their Street Medicine Detroit program, its medical director Richard Bryce, DO—and congrats to the university on its 150th anniversary.
It’s not just the cities, though, where PCPs should be trained. Suburbanites are aging alongside city dwellers and are also in need of more primary care access for prevention and treatment of chronic conditions as well as the physical realities of aging. Some progressive developers and builders, notably in Oakland County, are establishing partnerships with health systems to serve independent and assisted living communities for seniors that have lots of green space.
The model of one or two physicians seeing an entire senior residence will not work for the larger senior communities. Why not bring in residents in family practice, internal medicine and geriatrics to see first-hand the needs of this burgeoning population? (I just read in a Wall Street Journal article—“U.S. is Running out of Caregivers” that 10,000 people turn 65 every day in the U.S., and in 2020, there will be 56 million people 65 and older, up from 40 million in 2010. So we lack caregivers in addition to PCPs in the geriatric space. So many challenges for the healthcare community to resolve!)
Now, on to the topic of family medicine residency programs, which require three years of training in ambulatory, community and inpatient settings. In recent years, the community emphasis has increased, which is good, but we need to turn to our experienced, senior physicians as well, many of whom welcome the opportunity to train primary care residents in their private practices. Progressive OB/GYNs and pediatricians, for example, are checking for post-partum depression during the newborn visit and in the weeks following the baby’s birth. This is the type of behavioral health approach so critical to whole person primary care—and when possible it’s best offered in the mother’s medical home, where she has a trusted confidant in her physician. Think of the opportunity for a resident to learn the intricacies of treating the physical and emotional health of potentially vulnerable patients! Think of the end result!