Medical students have heart

By Leila Ugincius

First-year medical students finished off the 2006 school year with a tribute to faculty and staff members who have mentored them as part of the university’s Project HEART program.

Project HEART — Healing with Empathy, Acceptance, Respect and inTegrity — was launched at the beginning of the school year to serve as a constant reminder for students of why they were called into service as physicians. Under the program, first-year students are randomly assigned to groups that meet at regular intervals under the mentorship of a faculty or staff member.

The brainchild of Isaac Wood, M.D., associate dean for student activities in the VCU School of Medicine, the project is part of a schoolwide effort to deflect the sense of isolation, and sometimes cynicism, that medical school can create.

“It’s about how to maintain humanitarianism in the practice of medicine. We train it out of them. When they graduate, they’re jaded and cynical,” said Wood, citing studies that have shown “forty percent of physicians wish they had never gone into medicine.

“We need to bulletproof students against the hardening of medical school,” he said.

Kevin Lee, who just completed his first year, was in danger of experiencing that hardening within his first month of school. Lee had worked as a clinical technician at Inova Fairfax Hospital before starting medical school. Gregarious and friendly, Lee soon came to consider many of his patients as family.

The first blow came for Lee during orientation when he received a call that one of his cherished patients had died. He went on to lose one patient each week for three subsequent weeks. He shared theses experiences with his Project HEART group at its second meeting.

“The whole group decided this wasn’t something I was going to get through without help,” he recalls. “So when they saw me, they made a point to come talk to me. If they didn’t see me, there’d be a phone call checking on me.”
 
Anita M. Navarro, Lee’s Project HEART mentor, credits the project for the support Lee received. And, she says, that built-in support system wasn’t limited to just the students.

“I think I got out of it as much as the students got out of it,” she said.

Fellow mentor Cynthia Heldberg, Ph.D., agreed.

“I thought I was doing them a favor. What you don’t expect is how much they give you,” said Heldberg, dean of admissions in the VCU School of Medicine, noting that she felt an individual connection with each member of her group.

“Even as they’re becoming physicians, they’re living a real life,” she said.

Wood developed the idea for Project HEART after taking a course with Rachel Remen, a noted pioneer in holistic health. VCU’s pilot program proved so successful that it will be repeated with the incoming first-year class and re-modified for upcoming third-years. Moreover, this year’s first-year students will continue in their groups for their remaining three years of medical school — a prospect that pleases Lee.

“This is a good foundation,” he says, but “the strength of the program isn’t going to be now, it’s going to be in the third year. Third year is the year when most people lose the connection with the rest of the class. You start to get overwhelmed. You don’t sleep. When we get to the third year, this whole group will remember the glow you had in the beginning.”

At an informal ceremony last week in front of the Egyptian Building, students gave their mentors heart-shaped glass paperweights and paper heart cut-outs with personalized hand-written notes.