CPR Course Update #1

Structure Update
August 1-August 19, 2011
As members of the Structure faculty who are participating in our curriculum, we would like to give you the first of what will be a semiregular update on the progress of our students, both in the Structure lab and in other aspects of their curriculum. The first three weeks of Structure have gone extremely well, based both on the assessment of our faculty and on evaluation data from students. Students started their first day of medical school with most of their day spent in the Structure lab and in a larger group didactic session. The first Structure lab began with small groups spending 2 hours observing the external structure of a cadaver. This included not just detailed observation, but attempts to make inferences about the medical, biological and social implication of their visual and tactile findings. While not all of these inferences were necessarily correct, this exercise was their first step in tuning their clinical eye, and many students wrote quite moving reflective pieces on the experience. The lab concluded with an exercise involving palpation and dissection of pulse points, which provided the students with their first chance to cut into the cadaver, observe different tissue types, and correlate clinical observation, surface anatomy, and deeper anatomical structures. A second session in the first week linked to the EMT curriculum by focusing on the structure of the airway, including an opportunity for the students to perform a cricothyroidotomy on the same cadaver their observations came from and use task trainers in the lab to insert an endotracheal tube. In Week 2, our students had their first more typical lab of the course, which introduced them to the pathology, clinical anatomy (including tube thoracostomy), medical imaging and gross anatomy of the pulmonary system. Epithelium was our tissue of the week and it was presented in the context of cellular adaptation and the pulmonary system. This lab was paired up with a session on the pulmonary exam, helping to link the clinical hands on experience even closer with the basic science realm. Week 3 included topics in cardiovascular and thoracic structure, including cellular injury and adaptation in this context. Students also had an opportunity to spend focused time performing echocardiography. Outside of the Structure course, our students have been working on their first EMT shifts, which from all reports has been an incredible experience for them, learning the basics of pharmacology, fulfilling the State EMT curriculum requirements, and participating in sessions teaching them basic communication skills.

Schedule of Structure Labs: August 1 - Observation & Correlation

th st

August 5 Airway Management

th

August 9 - Intro to Pulmonary Structure

th

August 16 - Intro to Cardiovascular Structure

rd

August 23 - Intro to Abdominal & Pelvic Structure

th

August 30 - Intro to HEENT Structure

th

September 6 - Intro to Musculoskeletal Structure

th

September 13 - Intro to CNS/Neuromuscular Structure

Drs. Elkowitz and Esposito discuss cellular adaptation in the context of the pulmonary system with students.

Dr. Kwiatkowski helps students correlate imaging studies of pulmonary disease with Dr. Rennies functional models of pneumothorax, pneumonia and pleural effusion.