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WCM-Q med students visit HMC Heart Hospital

Dr. Liam Fernyhough and first-year medical student Hisham Abdelwahab examine a patient during the student visit to HMC Heart Hospital.
Dr. Liam Fernyhough and first-year medical student Hisham Abdelwahab examine a patient during the student visit to HMC Heart Hospital.

First-year medical students at Weill Cornell Medicine-Qatar (WCM-Q) reaped the benefits of the new curriculum’s emphasis on early introduction to physicianship skills when they visited HMC Heart Hospital to perform cardiac examinations on real patients.

WCM-Q’s innovative new curriculum has been designed to give students opportunities to interact with real patients under careful supervision almost from the beginning of their training, in contrast with traditional programs, which leave this to the latter stages.

A key element of providing early clinical experiences is WCM-Q’s strong collaborative relationship with Hamad Medical Corporation (HMC), where WCM-Q students take many of their clinical rotations, in which they spend time learning with experienced and gifted HMC physicians in many different hospital departments.

This year’s cohort of first-year WCM-Q students are the first to experience the new curriculum, which was launched in September last year. The visit to Hamad Medical Corporation’s Heart Hospital now forms part of the Health, Illness and Disease course that WCM-Q students take in the second semester of the first year of the Medical Program. Working closely with HMC is crucial for providing WCM-Q students with world-class training to enable them to become the next generation of doctors serving the community of Qatar and beyond.

During the one-day visit, 38 students worked in pairs to meet with a patient, take their medical history and then perform a clinical cardiac examination. This entailed taking the patient’s pulse, using the stethoscope to listen to their breathing and heartbeat, and then taking a blood pressure measurement. They then wrote up their notes and presented the case to a senior HMC cardiologist.

Dr. Liam Fernyhough, Assistant Professor of Medicine at WCM-Q, accompanied the students to the hospital to guide the learning experience and supervise the examinations. He said: “One of the key strengths of the new curriculum is that it maximizes the amount of time the students have to develop core clinical skills and helps to make the material they have been learning in the classroom relevant and memorable. This not only makes for extremely effective learning experiences but also gives the students a great boost in morale. We are very grateful to HMC and the patients who have so generously accommodated our students to make this learning experience possible.”

WCM-Q offers an integrated six-year Medical Program consisting of a two-year Premedical Curriculum and a four-year Medical Curriculum. Students who successfully complete the program are awarded a fully US-accredited MD degree. 

Student Toqa Afifi said: “This was the first time we had the chance to put our stethoscopes to good use and it was really an exciting moment for us to be able to apply in real life what we have learned in the classroom. We are very grateful to the patients for allowing us to examine them.”

HMC’s Associate Director of Medical Education, Dr. Maggie Allen said “HMC is delighted to offer WCM-Q students such important learning opportunities in their early clinical years. The Heart Hospital preceptor team, led by Dr. Salma S. Ibnouf, worked hard to ensure a rewarding clinical experience for the students.  This will be followed by a further three such Preceptorship visits within the medical wards of Hamad General Hospital in the coming months.”