Week 6- Chase Webb

This past week provided me with an interesting opportunity to learn more about medical education. Around the beginning of July, many of the fellows in cardiology I had come to know completed their fellowships and moved on to their new careers as attending physicians. In their place, a new batch of fellows arrived to start their specialization in some field of cardiology. During this transition, I got to see the change from people who had spent up to three years working in this hospital, honing their skills in the cath lab or clinic alongside the attendings, to ones who did not know where the supplies were kept or what number to call to let the EP lab know someone was coming. While this did not reduce the level of care the patients received, the nurses and attendings made sure of that, it did slow down some procedures and result in many more questions and hesitations than I had been accustomed to. Before this happened, I did not think that much about how fellows and residents learn the on the job skills that cannot learn in the classroom or by reading papers. Things like what a guidewire feels like as it goes an atrium, getting a patient to swallow a TEE probe when they just don’t feel like they are able, and the nuances of holding an ultrasound prove so that it’s in just the right position for the image you are trying to take. It was during this time that I felt like I best saw what it means for Weill Cornell to be a teaching hospital. It also made me reflect on my own experience this summer and the kinds of things I could not have learned about medicine without being here to observe them first hand. I hope that going forward I retain this information and am able to apply it to the work I do. I think it is a great advantage to more holistically approach research because understanding what patients care about, and that those considerations affect medical decisions far more than studies and clinical trial data, will help me design therapies that will not only help people but that patients want to choose. Being able to do this will make my work more attractive, and by extension help both improve patient usage (hopefully for the better if I am able to make treatments that are better than what is currently available) and open the door for other innovative work in the field of regenerative medicine and cardiology.