Training Students on the Effective Use of Translator Services: How Can You Treat Someone You Don’t Understand?

In 2005, the Virginia Commonwealth University School of Medicine partnered with the Inova Health System to create the first regional branch medical campus in Northern Virginia. As a part of this partnership, the VCU School of Medicine Inova Campus accepts a minimum of twenty-four medical students from the third and fourth year classes annually. In an effort to better prepare the incoming students for their clinical years and an extremely diverse patient population, a video was created to demonstrate effective use of translator services

Regional Medical Campuses: A New Classification System

There is burgeoning belief that regional medical campuses (RMCs) are a significant part of the narrative about medical education and the health care workforce in the United States and Canada. Although RMCs are not new, in the recent years of medical education enrollment expansion, they have seen their numbers increase. Class expansion explains the rapid growth of RMCs in the past 10 years, but it does not adequately describe their function. Often, RMCs have missions that differ from their main campus, especially in the areas of rural and community medicine. The absence of an easy-to-use classification system has led to a lack of current research about RMCs as evidenced by the small number of articles in the current literature. The authors describe the process of the Group on Regional Medical Campuses used to develop attributes of a campus separate from the main campus that constitute a “classification” of a campus as an RMC. The system is broken into four models—basic science, clinical, longitudinal, and combined—and is linked to Liaison Committee on Medical Education standards. It is applicable to all schools and can be applied by any medical school dean or medical education researcher. The classification system paves the way for stakeholders to agree on a denominator of RMCs and conduct future research about their impact on medical education

The Medical Futures Program: How One Regional Medical Campus Educates Its Community

Poster created for the 2012 GRMC Session of the AAMC Annual Meeting. The Virginia Commonwealth University School of Medicine Inova Campus has extensive ties to the northern Virginia community. The Medical Futures Program was created to provide valuable information regarding medical school admissions and current physician workforce issues to high school and university students, their parents, and guests

M3 SOAP Note Training: Don’t Take the Basics for Granted

The Virginia Commonwealth University School of Medicine (VCU SOM) is a premier academic medical center in the United States that is focused on medical education innovation. The main campus is located in Richmond, Virginia. In 2005, the VCU SOM partnered with Inova Health Systems to create a regional medical campus in Northern Virginia, the VCU SOM Inova Campus. In August 2009, two fourth-year medical students created and presented on “SOAP Notes: A M3 Primer” to third year students at the Clinical Skills Day, as part of M3 orientation. This project was completed in collaboration with Inova Research in Medical Education Center

Regional Medical Campus Match Data 2007-2009 Comparisons, Analysis, and Trends

Poster created for the 2010 AAMC Workforce Conference, present analysis of match data from all regional medical campuses for 2007-2009

Epithelial NOTCH signaling rewires the tumor microenvironment of colorectal cancer to drive poor-prognosis subtypes and metastasis

The metastatic process of colorectal cancer (CRC) is not fully understood and effective therapies are lacking. We show that activation of NOTCH1 signaling in the murine intestinal epithelium leads to highly penetrant metastasis (100% metastasis; with >80% liver metastases) in KrasG12D-driven serrated cancer. Transcriptional profiling reveals that epithelial NOTCH1 signaling creates a tumor microenvironment (TME) reminiscent of poorly prognostic human CRC subtypes (CMS4 and CRIS-B), and drives metastasis through transforming growth factor (TGF) β-dependent neutrophil recruitment. Importantly, inhibition of this recruitment with clinically relevant therapeutic agents blocks metastasis. We propose that NOTCH1 signaling is key to CRC progression and should be exploited clinically. In a genetically engineered mouse model, Jackstadt et al. show that NOTCH1 activation drives metastasis in KRASG12D-driven serrated colorectal cancer (CRC) through TGFβ-dependent neutrophil recruitment. Thus, targeting neutrophil recruitment is a potential therapeutic approach in metastatic CRC