The class of 2013 at Hopkins's School of Medicine will be the first to experience the school's new, vastly-revised curriculum, one that has been under development for the past six years.
The new curriculum will implement sweeping changes, including giving first- and second-year students greater clinical responsibilities, introducing new courses, increasing the use of patient simulators for student training and changing the way that doctors approach the treatment of disease.
Charles Wiener, professor of Medicine and Physiology and chair of the Curriculum Reform Committee from 2003 to 2008, said that the curriculum change reflected a fundamental shift in the way that doctors view disease.
"What we're doing is changing the framework by which we want people to think about health and disease," he said. "We are moving away from a normal/abnormal paradigm to one where we believe in variability and adaptability."
Wiener explained that one focus of the new curriculum will be to understand how the same disease can manifest itself in unique ways in different individuals and how doctors can use this knowledge to tailor their treatments for maximum effectiveness.
"Three people can get influenza, one of which winds up in the hospital, one of which didn't know he had it and one of which winds up sick for a couple days," he said.
"Why the difference? The point is that the tools are there now to understand those differences, and we're just at the dawn of that understanding. That's the kind of way that doctors in the future are going to be able to think."
According to the medical school's Curriculum Reform Committee Web site, other motivations for altering the curriculum included a desire to incorporate emerging technologies into medical education, to integrate classwork with hands-on opportunities to practice clinical skills and to provide students with more electives in specialized areas of interest.
The curriculum will be a vast change for Hopkins students.
"This is actually the first [curriculum reform] in a long time that was kind of a blank slate curriculum. We didn't plug in any of the old curriculum into this one," Wiener said.
Under the current curriculum, medical students only get experience practicing their clinical skills during years three and four.
The new curriculum will offer this experience to students earlier - during their first and second years - and for a greater duration: a year instead of the month offered under the previous curriculum.
Wiener noted that this would not only give medical students more experience and responsibility early on but would also provide them with more opportunities to apply the clinical skills they learned in the classroom and to "make them feel like they're in medical school."
Another tool that will be utilized more is patient simulators that can provide students with a risk-free opportunity to learn new skills.
Wiener felt that while the simulators might not offer all the unpredictability present in a real clinical scenario, they are sill helpful for training new students.
"They're very good for teaching procedures in terms of getting students up to a level of competence for performing them," he said.
"They're also very good for learning basic communication and physical examination skills."
Current Hopkins students will not be significantly affected by the changes in curriculum, as Jane Andrews, a current third-year student, pointed out.
"My sense is that as a whole, the students currently at Hopkins want to know 'how will this curriculum affect me?' And for many of us, the answer is 'not that much,'" she wrote in an e-mail to the News-Letter.
While she might not experience many of the changes at the medical school before she graduates, Andrews felt that they would enhance students' experiences in the future.
"I think that the new medical school building will add energy and morale overall to the School of Medicine," she wrote.
According to Elizabeth Goodspeed, an administrator in the Office of the Vice Dean for Education, medical students have been offering suggestions for the program since discussions about the curriculum began.
"Medical students have been involved in the curriculum reform process since its very beginning back in 2003," she wrote in an e-mail to the News-Letter.
"In fact, there were several student representatives on the Curriculum Reform Committee originally chaired by Dr. Charlie Wiener. Their input has been very important to us in considering the GTS [Genes to Society] curriculum."
In addition to the curriculum change, students will be spending the majority of their classroom time in the Armstrong Medical Education Building when they are not on the wards or at the patient simulation center next door.
"Armstrong will be a state-of-the-art building that will have the technology and space to accommodate new teaching techniques we will use in the GTS curriculum," she wrote.
Goodspeed anticipated that while this fall's transition would take some adjusting, the school was well-prepared for the changes ahead.
"As with any big change, we are bracing ourselves for little bumps along the way, however, overall we are prepared for the transition," she wrote.
Wiener also felt that the curriculum changes would serve to enhance the quality of medical education for Hopkins students.
"It is novel, and nobody else I think has been moving forward so quickly with this notion of individuality," he said. "We've always been good at medical school here, and I think this will make it even better."
The curriculum reform process involved three phases.
In the first phase, the Reform Committee laid out a basic structure for the changes to follow.
In the second phase, over 150 faculty members, administrators and students were solicited to provide assistance with planning and consulting.
During phase two the Reform Committee also formed 12 "discipline-based" committees, charged with detailing how the curriculum reform would affect their particular field.
In fall 2006, the committee dissolved and plans for implementation began.
The first class to experience the new curriculum will be those entering this fall, the School of Medicine's class of 2013.
