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Third-Year Students Mark Beginning of Clerkships with "Student Clinician's Ceremony"
In June, third-year medical students filed into the Oral Health Pavilion of the Dental School to take part in New Jersey Medical School's "Student Clinician's Ceremony."
Described as a "transitional experience designed to provide guidance, information and support..." the ceremony marks the beginning of the students' clerkships.
The event's keynote speaker, NJMS Associate Professor of Surgery Dr. Dorian Wilson, emphasized the importance of providing humanistic care to patients.
"In order to provide good health care, you have to have caring and healing," Dr. Wilson said, imploring students ask three questions during their visits with patients: Do you have pain? Do you have any questions? Is there anything I can do for you?
As a transplantation surgeon, Dr. Wilson is quite familiar with the challenges doctors encounter when treating patients. But when a recent illness briefly confined the 2007 Leonard Tow Humanism in Medicine Award recipient to a hospital bed, he was brought face to face with his own concerns as a patient.
"To go from ability to complete inability is astounding," said Dr. Wilson, who also serves as the Director of the Healthcare Foundation Center for Humanism and Medicine at New Jersey Medical School .
Dr. Wilson encouraged the students to tap into their patients' feelings as well as their own, saying, "It's no longer taboo to cry with our patients."
During the ceremony, six residents were presented with the Arnold P. Gold Foundation's "Humanism and Excellence in Teaching Award" by members of the Class of 2008 for their "commitment to teaching and compassionate treatment of patients and families, students and colleagues." In addition to the award, each resident - Drs. Zeyad Baker; Thomas R. Christiano; Eugene K. Kim; Timothy Ryan Mainardi; Christina Pisani; and Bobby J. Rupani - was presented with a certificate, a specially designed lapel pin and a check for $250 from the Gold Foundation.
Dr. Mainardi told students to ensure that patients are treated equally.
"Every patient deserves the utmost amount of respect and every patient deserves everything you've got," she said.
Click here for background information on each of the Humanism and Excellence in Teaching Award recipients and accompanying nomination statements by the Class of 2008.