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At the Senekos refugee camp in Macedonia, across the border from Kosovo, it’s evening, and another busload of ethnic Albanian refugees has just arrived–exhausted, dehydrated, and disoriented. Yale medical students help with the triage, but their role is healing in the broadest sense. “There was an older woman, about 75 years old, and she got off the bus and just stood there and looked around,” Margaret Bourdeaux ’02 remembers. “I walked up and offered her a glass of water and she waved it away. I offered her a Kleenex and she burst into tears, and she grabbed me and just stood there crying and holding on for dear life.” When the dean’s office agreed to sponsor a delegation to Macedonia under the auspices of the relief organization Doctors of the World, more than 1oo students wanted to go. Six were selected, by lottery, along with Pamela Perry, an assistant professor of surgery specializing in emergency medicine, and Emine Alijaj, a Yale-trained physician associate (see above) whose family is Kosovo Albanian. In their month at Senekos, the camp population has grown from 800 to more than 6,000. The students have come to know the inhabitants through a tent-to-tent survey of medical needs and an assessment of the nutritional status of children in the camp. Their mandate is to help in any way they can. “As medical students, we tend to fixate on the care that we can give to treat an illness, to cure an infection, to ease the pain of a disease,” Seth Goldbarg ’01 writes in his journal. “Here in Senekos we see battered souls in need of healing. We meet children starved for attention and parents struggling to do all they can for their families.” Faced with the enormity of what the refugees have been through, the students have quickly marshaled their creativity, their sensitivity, and their empathy to respond to the whole person and the whole community. They teach school (many young Albanians have been excluded by law from schools in Kosovo), organize soccer and volleyball leagues for teenagers, and launch a children’s theater program–whatever helps the camp residents begin to rebuild their lives. (The students will return from Senekos more committed and energized than ever. They will form the Yale Project for Health Action, extending the School of Medicine’s long tradition of public service beyond the borders of the United States. With significant support from the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation, the program will send students to such desperately needy places as Bangladesh and South Africa, where they can serve the local population–especially the children–and gain invaluable practical experience themselves.) |
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The Physician Associate Program  Established in 1971, Yale’s Physician Associate Program is a highly selective, 25-month program that trains 36 men and women per year to assume significant decision-making authority in the care, diagnosis, and treatment of patients. Graduates work in a wide variety of settings taking patients’ histories, conducting physical examinations, formulating courses of treatment, counseling patients, and performing medical procedures ranging from suturing lacerations to assisting in surgery. The first 10 months of the program are devoted to course work in basic and clinical sciences. After that, each student completes seven required clinical rotations: Emergency Medicine and Surgery General Surgery Internal Medicine Obstetrics and Gynecology Pediatrics Primary Care Psychiatry Students also select five elective rotations in such areas as: Ambulatory Medicine Anesthesiology Cardiology Cardiothoracic Surgery Dermatology Diagnostic Imaging Endocrinology Gastroenterology Geriatrics Hematology/Oncology Hospice Industrial and Occupational Medicine Infectious Disease Neonatology Neurosurgery Ophthalmology Orthopaedic Neurosurgery Orthopaedics Otolaryngology Pediatric Cardiology Plastic Surgery Rehabilitative Medicine Rheumatology Sports Medicine Trauma Many of these rotations take place in the New Haven area, but students generally spend at least eight weeks in rotations in other states. Successful completion of the program leads to the degree of Master of Medical Science. |
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Last modified: Wednesday, 11-Aug-2004 14:59:36 EDT. (PL) |