Sparrow Hospital, the Ingham Regional Medical Center and MSU have formed a partnership to improve MSU's medical residency program and patient care in the Lansing area.
The partnership, which is in the beginning stages, would combine finances, physical resources and facilities.
"The main goal is to have a more organized and more collaborative approach to medical education, and to achieve the efficiency and increased quality that that can result in," said Larry Rawsthorne, vice president of medical affairs for Sparrow Hospital.
About a year ago, there was concern that with the possible expansion of MSU's medical school to Grand Rapids there would be fewer resources in the Lansing area for medical students, said Dianne Wagner, the associate dean for graduate medical education in the College of Human Medicine. The three institutions got together to make sure this didn't happen, she said.
"We want to enrich and strengthen medical education in Lansing so that Lansing and its institutions are the destination where the very best graduate students for medical school want to train, the best facilities are, where the best faculty want to teach, and where there is vibrant research and the best patient care," Wagner said.
Wagner said the program will improve evaluation of the residents and allow them to participate in research. She added that administrators will use a new software program that will be able to keep track of the residents through the three different institutions. The partnership also would train the residents in not only technical skills, but also help them to develop their personal skills when dealing with patients.
The first part of the program is an assessment of the residents that will begin in June.
A unique goal of the program is creating a model to test residents on their skills of compassion toward patients, said Geoff Linz, the chief medical officer for the Ingham Regional Medical Center.
This includes things such as making eye contact, shaking hands at the beginning of an appointment and allowing patients to talk enough so they feel that residents listened to them.
"It's not a better investment of time, but just better use of that time," Linz said. "When you come to closure, you should be able to say, 'This is what I found, this is what I plan on doing. I'm glad you came in today.' It took me how long to say that? Ten seconds, but that's huge. The patient feels like there is closure.
"Communication skills are as important as anything else."
Allowing the three major health institutions in the area to combine makes sense for more than financial reasons, Wagner said.
"Even if there is equal quality, there is lost efficiency," she said. "There is lost money, lost people and perhaps wasted effort.
"I think in this day and age of shrinking resources and very busy people stretched in different ways, to combine and do something that is needed for everyone at once makes a lot of sense."
