(upbeat music)
- Hi to everyone who joined.
I'm Lucy, I'm the facilitator for this session.
Today, we have representatives
from Medicine in Mandarin and MedSpanish.
So we're going to start with just a brief introduction
of all of the panelists and their role in
medicine based-electives here at Michigan.
- Good evening.
My name is Manuel Valdivieso.
I'm from Peru.
My role is to be an instructor
in the Spanish intermediate class.
With pleasure, we tailor this
to the curriculum with the students
so that we emphasize the different systems
throughout the class
but also within the history taking slowly,
like, will learn how to welcome a patient,
how to ask the patient for the main complaint,
how to get to the primary history, (indistinct)
the social history, family history, et cetera.
All of these different components throughout the year.
I will let Jessica to give us
a better presentation on the course.
I look forward to see you guys in the future.
Jessica, please.
- Hi everyone.
Congrats on getting into Michigan.
I hope you're considering it strongly.
So these are all different students involved
in the medical Spanish program.
Dr. Valdivieso and Dr. Kate Hughey
are the faculty sponsors for us.
This is a timeline
of what your time at Michigan could look like
if you were to decide to be part of Medical Spanish.
In your first year
if you are an intermediate to advanced speaker
we recommend that you take part in the intermediate elective
or the advanced discussion group.
If you're just starting to dip your toes into Spanish,
I would do the beginner seminar series.
And I'll talk about what these are in a second.
And then as you progress
through your clinical years and into the branches
then you could continue with the advanced discussion group
because those cases change,
every month is a different faculty member.
Or in addition you could be a teaching assistant
to the intermediate elective when they have breakout groups.
And then there are also opportunities for service learning,
so I've been an interpreter at the student run free clinic
which sees uninsured patients.
And then you can also take part in the migrant clinic
which largely takes care of like,
middle aged farm workers that mostly come from Mexico
and they're just here in Michigan for a summer.
And then we also, every year through our chapter of LMSA
hold a health fair in Ann Arbor.
And during your clinical year, during the clerkships,
you can be asked to be placed in Spanish speaking locations
like, with particular faculty that also speak Spanish.
And so you'll go see your patient in Spanish
and then come back and present them in Spanish as well
and come up with the plan and then give that to the patient.
And you can do that for pediatrics,
family medicine, internal medicine.
And then later on there's also
room to do international electives
or individually arranged electives
if there's a population or a disease of interest.
These are the three different options.
So the beginner seminar series is more informal.
It's about once a month,
led by upperclassmen that are native speakers,
going over introductory conversation topics,
cultural discussions.
And then bread and butter of the program
is the intermediate medicine Spanish elective.
It's two semesters long led by Dr. Valdivieso.
And that's part of a national study
on medical Spanish curriculum.
And then the advanced discussion group
models your chief concern class,
where you'll go over presenting symptom
and then the differential diagnosis for that symptom
and how you would ask your patient about it.
It says a little more about the intermediate elective.
There are 10 sessions.
It's led by Dr. Valdivieso,
so he's a Heme/Onc physician.
And then there are two standardized patient evaluations.
And it was run entirely by zoom this year,
which was incredible.
This is the syllabus from this last year.
You can see that it follows,
the vocabulary pre-work section
follows the M1 curriculum roughly.
And so you'll have an idea as long,
in part, also, with the stuff on the left
that goes over the doctorate curriculum.
So it mirrors the M1 curriculum
and is best suited to do it when you have
more free time as an M1.
Our medical Spanish program is part of our chapter of LMSA,
and we have tons of Spanish speaking faculty that help us
and have been instrumental to the program
and as well as residents that are Spanish speakers,
and including the residents
that are part of our Spanish language
and community medicine track.
Sometimes we also have patient encounters by Skype
with Dr. Valdivieso when he's in Peru, which is pretty cool.
And then the fantastic Standardized Patients
halfway through of the class and at the end of the class
where you go through the medical interviews
that you've learned in English in your M1 year,
all the communication skills
as well as the Spanish vocab.
And then this is a little bit more
about the advanced discussion class,
which I talked about before.
On bottom right you see a picture
of one of our cardiologists, Dr. Moles,
and then a cardiology resident from Argentina
that was coming to visit.
And they co-led a class on pericarditis,
which is pretty cool.
In conclusion I really hope that if you come to Michigan
you will take part in this course.
It has been just the light of my time here.
I'm so happy to be able to play a part of it.
And also student input is what drives the program forward
and what makes us better.
So we're always looking for more students to be part of
our student curriculum committee as well.
These are other people involved
who I have to say thank you to.
- Thanks so much, Jessica.
My name is Benjamin.
I'm an M1 here at Michigan.
I'm part of the incoming Medicine in Mandarin leadership
and was able to take the course this past fall.
And so happy to meet everyone
and talk a little bit about Medicine in Mandarin.
So this elective,
it's available to first-year medical students.
The target of the course is specifically for students
who have an intermediate
to advanced knowledge of spoken Mandarin.
It is a one semester course,
it runs from August until December.
We meet biweekly,
so Tuesdays and Thursdays, usually from 6:00 to 7:00 PM.
This year, we did it all virtually
and we're hopeful that maybe we can be back in person
next year.
But we managed to have a number of, you know,
assignments and activities that were all done virtually.
It's designed to correspond with the M1 curriculum.
And so what you'll find is, if you come here to Michigan,
the scientific trunk is structured in such a way
where everything's in certain sequences,
like the organ systems are all in sequences.
So the Medicine in Mandarin elective,
different units in Medicine in Mandarin
are designed to correspond with the scientific trunk,
so that helps with continuity of material.
There is a focus on speaking.
So it's not necessary to be able
to read or write in Mandarin,
although that might be helpful.
Definitely have found that from personal experience
it is easier if you know how to read and write
but it's not necessary at all.
I have a number of classmates who don't read or don't write
but they do just fine in the course.
Again, the focus is more on conversation
and being able to converse with patients in Mandarin.
There's short, weekly quizzes.
There's two SP or standardized patient experiences
towards the end of the semester.
One is with a Mandarin speaking community member,
and one sort of a final capstone exam project
is with a Mandarin interpreter at the hospital.
There's a great website that has been put together
by our instructor and by a number of medical students
who were in this course.
So this is sort of a home base for our program
that has like, audio
and all the vocabulary that's necessary.
So it's easy to reference and it's good.
Even now for me having finished the curriculum
to go back and review things if needed.
Jane Chang Miller, Dr. Miller is our instructor.
We have a faculty advisor
and then there's three of us M1's
who are going onto the leadership next year.
Feel free to email me if you have questions
in case there's something that doesn't get answered
during our time together, but thanks so much.
- Great, thank you so much panelists.
If you have any questions,
feel free to put them in the chat.
Jessica Carducci, do you want to start?
- Yeah, thanks for sharing that, guys.
That was really cool.
My question was just that,
so with both these programs and opportunities,
they're available, like, right when we get there as M1's.
I'm just wondering if we're not really sure, like,
where we stand in our language skills,
like if it's kind of been a few years,
if we did it in undergrad a few years ago,
will there be like some kind of exam
to like, place us into which course
or like, someone to kind of like guide us into like,
oh, you're intermediate as opposed to beginner,
and stuff like that?
- I can speak to the MedSpanish,
that we recommend that incoming students
come to all the classes that are, you know,
maybe in their range that they're possibly interested in.
And then there's no obligation after that, you know,
after a month or so I bet you can decide,
oh, this isn't for me,
or I just want to stick with one class,
or I want to do both.
It's totally up to you.
And then we've also offered to students
to be able to do like,
a conversation, like a phone conversation,
or if hopefully COVID cleans up
an in-person, just like, talk to me for 10 minutes
and I'll give you an idea
of what might be the best place for you.
- For Mandarin, there's like a short application.
And so they just ask that you do a quick like,
one to two minute recording
of sort of an introduction in Mandarin
for the course instructor to assess your proficiency.
And I found that most of the time
people who have an interest in the course,
everyone basically gets in.
It's not designed to be, just sort of winnow people out.
You know, we start pretty basically
on the first few weeks and then sort of ramp up as we go,
but it's meant to foster and help growth.
- I was wondering, do you feel
like it's overwhelming to do this
and also be involved in like research and service
in med school?
Or do you feel like it was manageable
with your curriculum?
- For Medical Spanish, I have thought
it's been really the most fun part of my week.
Like, thinking back to M1 year
when we could also meet in person.
And we had dinner every time that we met.
People would often stay right after that and go study.
And the fact that it mirrors the curriculum,
it was just like reinforcing the material.
And sometimes you even have a professor
that's giving a class in your normal,
in your like, English curriculum doing a MedSpanish class.
And so you kind of get like a hint, hint,
this might be on the test type of deal.
So it was extra helpful.
- We don't take exams and we don't chastise anybody.
- Thank you guys
so much for joining. - Thank you.
- If you have any questions,
feel free to contact us later.
Thank you guys.