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COOPERSTOWN

Six doctors-in-the-making are about to spend “the pinnacle experience, the capstone experience” of their medical training at Bassett Healthcare.
And Bassett is hoping the result will be a pinnacle experience, a capstone experience, in the Cooperstown hospital’s 80 years of training physicians.
Beginning Monday, Aug. 11, the six – the plan is to raise that number to 12 next year – will begin their third year of training in an intensive 13-week rotation through the hospital’s departments.
Then comes the second phase, “very innovative,” said Laura Schweitzer, Bassett’s chief academic officer, in a recent interview. “Not many hospitals are doing it.”
This is an “innovative clerkship,” where the students will be assigned patients as they come in the door.
“They will work with the physician,” said Schweitzer, “diagnosing, staying with the patient during the entire course of their illness, for surgery and post-op.
“And they will keep in touch with them after they return home.”
Some medical schools do this for six weeks; here, it will be 30 weeks. The academic officer used words like “longitudinal” and “integrated” to describe it.
This new program – the long-standing affiliation with Columbia Presbyterian continues – was made possible through a partnership with Albany Medical College announced in June.
The model was developed at Harvard. “They may be assigned a pregnant woman,” Schweitzer said, “and that same week, they may be assigned to a patient in the cardiac unit.”
The six students know each other, so there should be camaraderie right from the start.

Labels: Bassett Healthcare, Front Page, Laura Schweitzer