The nation's second largest medical school, which this year will graduate its first class trained to link competency, professionalism, ethics and life long learning, will serve as a laboratory for the study of relationship-centered medical care. The IU and Regenstrief researchers will investigate how relationship-centered care -- which brings physicians' relationships with their patients, their patients' families, other caregivers, and communities into play -- can be incorporated in a medical school curriculum and post-medical school training thereby influencing the way future physicians practice medicine. The researchers also will conduct investigational studies on relationship-centered care itself.

Over the next three years, they will look at how to train future physicians to focus on these interpersonal interactions, to provide care in a fashion that expresses the same principles as the old fashioned bedside manner of simpler times when physicians were not pressured to see patients in a short period of time. They also plan to teach medical students how this compassionate care can be practiced by physicians in the competitive health care environment of the twenty-first century.

In addition to working with medical students, residents and fellows, the IU and Regenstrief investigators will develop a body of research to shed light on what clinicians and patients are actually doing, thinking and feeling as they interact.

Thomas S. Inui, Sc.M., M.D, associate dean for health care research, and the Sam Regenstrief Professor of Health Services Research at the Indiana University School of Medicine and president and chief executive officer of Regenstrief Institute Inc., wi
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Contact: Cindy Fox Aisen
caisen@iupui.edu
317-274-7722
Indiana University
24-Apr-2003