Health tests from commercial companies are becoming increasingly popular in the Netherlands. This brings new developments in health care, but in the medical curriculum there is still hardly any attention for this. How can an elective module change this?
Currently, the curriculum for students of Medicine and Biomedical Sciences does not yet focus on commercial health checks. However, it is important that students learn about this, as these tests are becoming increasingly popular and they radically reverse patients' demand for care. Indeed, instead of the patient coming to the doctor with a complaint, a healthy citizen in the case of the health check looks for possible diseases early on.
The starting point of the choice module are questions such as whether care should become partly based on this, in what way and what risks it entails. Based on real cases about total body scans, DNA tests and discussions with experts by experience, students interactively deal with various ethical and practical issues they might encounter in their work.
Plan of action
With the help of a Comenius Teaching Fellowship from the National Education Research Agency, Jeanette Mostert started a project to develop the elective module.
The project team consisted of lecturers from different disciplines, including a radiologist, a neurobiologist, an ethicist and a lecturer in patient communication. In addition, two students, two members of the patient advisory board and an employee of a health testing company also worked on the project. This allowed as many aspects and perspectives of the phenomenon to become addressed, all centred around different cases of commercial health checks. The assignments, including debating, creating infographics and practising patient communication, were developed on the basis of teachers', students' and patients' experiences.
Learning outcome
After the project, it appears that students became very enthusiastic about working with real cases and looking at different perspectives. However, designing suitable cases and finding experts by experience was quite a challenge for Jeanette and her team. Students appreciated the wide variety of assignments and found this non-traditional form of teaching motivating. Moreover, involving students and patients in developing the profession proved to provide a pleasant and necessary sounding board. For instance, the students involved knew which assignments would and would not work well with their fellow students, and could point out all kinds of practical objections or advantages that teachers had not thought of.