Continuity of care and chronicity in medical students’ education: ‘adopt’ a chronic patient

ABSTRACT

Purpose: Nowadays chronicity is one of the most frequent aspects of care doctors have to deal with. Students need to know and learn clinical, relational, social and managerial elements of chronicity and changes that disease causes in patients, families and doctors themselves.

Methods: Students are supervised by a family doctor, in taking care of ‘their’ patient and of his/her family. They are asked to keep an updated diary, participate in the periodical revision of the medical history and write an end-report. Two focus groups were conducted, adopting a constructive qualitative approach in order to analyse results.

Results: The focus groups and the SWOT analysis show common themes such as innovative learning and multidisciplinary approach. Clinical evolution of the disease, mental and body changes and the diagnostic and therapeutic future planning were also revealed.

Conclusions: The main goal of this innovation was understanding the importance of a continuous clinical relationship and of the role of the doctor as ‘therapy itself’. The project was demonstrated to be able to teach the future physicians how to practice more empathetic medicine and to improve the skills needed in a complex relational environment including that of chronic disease.

KEYWORDS:

• Empathy
• care continuity
• focus-groups
• qualitative research
• active learning

Acknowledgments

We are grateful to all members of the project including patients and their families and to Prof. Pringle (Division of Primary Care, University of Nottingham) and to Gaetano D’Ambrosio for manuscript revision.

Disclosure statement

The authors report no conflicts of interest.

Notes

1. The SWOT analysis (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats analysis) is a framework for identifying and analysing the internal and external factors that can have an impact on the viability of a project, product, place or person.