Our Faculty has been including a methodology, right in the first year of the medical degree, intended to confront medical candidates with the reality of medical practice for over thirteen years: it is called Health Practice in the Community (PSC) I, which is currently part of Module III.II – the Doctor, the Person and the
Patient.

Health Practice in the Community enables students to share the lives of GPs in health centres all over the country for two weeks in July. Our role is just to facilitate and formalize students’ contacts with their own GPs and the internship takes place in the students’ home environment, whether in Alto Minho, Eastern Algarve, in the Azores or in Madeira. We rely on almost 300 tutors in over 200 healthcare facilities.

This offers direct contact with medicine and with the reality of people in their environment, in neighbourhoods and villages: it beings students closer to the humanity of customs, addictions and beliefs, to the strengths and weaknesses of families, and see people asking for sick leave merely because they are exhausted; it discloses the world of pregnant adolescents, of those who do not have the money to buy medical drugs, of those who do not have the time to cook proper diets, of the elderly who have no one else to talk to…. Dressed in white coats and standing next to the doctor, students see the multitude of clinical, social and human problems unfold before them and confront their initial ideas, often influenced by television series, with the social reality that will be the setting of their professional lives.

Due to its proximity to patients and involvement with their families and their social, economic and cultural environments, General and Family Medicine (GFM) is certainly the medical specialty where the human connection between a Doctor and his Patient is felt more intensely, hence the emotional impact PSC 1 has on year 1 students. It is a Medicine that encompasses a huge breath of clinical knowledge and other types of understanding: relational, such as the capacity to adapt the dialogue and interpret body language; experiential, such as empathy and compassion; the ability to diagnose, medicate and offer relief/heal without being affected by value judgments or prejudices… This revelation of the social role of the Doctor extends concepts and materializes expectations regarding the profession.

Another constructive aspect of PSC I is the opportunity given to students to question themselves in terms of their own availability to patients, to anticipate the reality of life as a physician, rewards and weariness, the conjugation between doctors’ personal and family lives and their clinical duties, and their resilience to psychological strain and routine.

This two-week immersion in GFM is only possible thanks to the collaboration of General Practitioners with this project as tutors and to the health units involved. It offers our younger students, newly arrived at the Faculty, a picture of what is like “Being a Doctor”, encourages their own learning process and is determining for their future attitude as professionals. We express our gratitude to all those involved for enriching the Integrated Master Degree in Medicine.

We based this testimony on the analysis of the internship reports submitted by the students and also on the results of the anonymous survey made to students at the end of the last academic year. It was a very positive evaluation, which encourages us to continue this model to learn medicine.

By bringing our students to the community and by connecting our Faculty to the National Health System we are certainly contributing to a solid, multifaceted and stimulating Medical Education.

Prof. Luís Rebelo Coordinator of Module III.II “The Doctor, the Person and the Patient” – Health Practice in the Community

Mª Manuela Ajuda L Nunes (Mané) Secretary
ajuda@fm.ul.pt