Electives offered by others

Clinical Ethics Consultation (35143) - Ethics may be regarded as the study and application of right conduct in matters of behavior where there is a large potential for harms or benefits or where people have duties and obligations to others. Ethical dilemmas arise when an individual's or a profession's code of ethics is silent with regard to a particular issue (i.e. cloning, stem cell research) or different values come into conflict (e.g., patient's right to confidentiality conflicts with ability to provide best care for the patient).This elective is designed to expose students to ethical issues that arise in the clinical care of patients. Students will become familiar with common medical ethical issues through short readings in medical ethics and involvement in the Clinical Ethics Consultation Service. Students will be expected to be available on an on-call basis for Ethics Consultation during the entire period of the elective. This may require availability during evenings or on weekends. Students will attend the Memorial Medical Center's Human Values and Ethics committee monthly meeting, should it occur during the period of the elective.

Community Health Services and Resources (15143) - This elective will provide brief exposures to various ancillary health and social service resources in the community. The student will learn about types of community health and social service resources useful for the many patients whose needs require more intervention than physicians alone can provide. Students will visit a maximum of 11 agencies during the week, observe services, and interview agency personnel. The agencies are selected by the faculty member based on: 1) Learning relevance (i.e., replicability in other communities or exceptional quality), and 2) Agency logistics. The agencies are located in Springfield, Illinois, although exceptions have permitted students to learn about agencies in downstate Illinois communities where they plan residency training or eventual practice. Exceptions are only at faculty discretion, since faculty review of agency appropriateness is required.

Issues in Minority Health Care (15303) - This elective will allow the student to explore minority health issues through readings and informal discussions with faculty and various agency staff. Investigations of the areas outlined in the objectives may be library-based or agency-based. Students are expected to use faculty as tutor and present investigation results on course book assignments to faculty at the end of the week. Textbooks will be provided to students to guide knowledge and questions. Face to face meetings with faculty will occur twice, once at the beginning and once at the end of the elective.

Law, Religion and American Health Care (35584) - During this elective the student will read legal cases and articles, view films and online materials, and orally analyze with faculty the relation between law, religion and American health care in relation to the following: The Religious Freedom Restoration Act (Hobby Lobby case); the Affordable Care Act and employer based health coverage including contraceptive mandate; legal obligations and accommodations of religious health systems (ACLU v. Catholic Bishops); health care decision making for minors with religious parents; stem cell, end of life care, and assisted death policies and their relation to religion; "medicalization" of religious beliefs such as regulation of homosexual conversion therapy.

Statistics in Medical Research (30014) - This elective will focus on the statistical and research design skills physicians need to have in order to be intelligent users of research results. Activities will include lecture/discussion, review of articles, and working with data sets, both in class and independently. Topics will include reading tables and graphs; understanding and using means, medians and standard deviations; estimation and hypothesis testing (confidence limits, t-z tests, chi-square, correlation and regression); methods used in analyzing survival data (life-tables, logistic regression); detecting sources of bias in different types of study designs (case-control, cohort, cross-sectional, clinical trials); interpreting p-values; estimating sample sizes, and any other student-initiated topic.