What is the Volunteer Family Experience?

What is the Doctoring Course?

Doctoring: Caring for Patients, Families and Communities is a required, 4 year course for medical students. Students will learn foundational information to become thoughtful and skilled physicians, such as diagnostic and clinical skills (history and physical exam), teamwork, communication skills, and effective collaboration with patients/families and other healthcare providers to treat disease, alleviate suffering and optimize health. Students will also begin to shape their own professional identities by critically evaluating the complexities of clinical medicine and the personal, psychosocial and societal aspects of illness.

What is the role of Volunteer Families in the Doctoring Course?

Families who volunteer to participate in the Doctoring Course are willing to share their stories and experiences related to healthcare with two-three medical students approximately four times during the students' first year of medical school. Families are asked to commit to a volunteer orientation, a welcome reception, 2 home visits and 1 clinic visit. This provides our students with experience from the patient's and family's perspectives that cannot be duplicated in a classroom or clinic. Volunteer families share how illness impacts the patient as both an individual and as a member of a family and society through targeted discussions with their students. Our students internalize the experiences you share with them and apply it to the rest of their training and beyond.

How being a Volunteer Family with the Doctoring Course works

After going through an application and interview process to ensure that this experience is a good fit both for you and the Medical School, you will be assigned a pair of medical students. Traditionally, students and families meet for the first time at a welcome reception that is held in August. At that point, the students and the families work together to schedule the visits at times that are agreeable to both the students and the families for the 2 home visits and the 1 clinic visit. Students will come to each visit prepared with targeted questions about your experiences with illness and its impact on your life and family. After the visits, students will meet with small groups of peers and faculty mentors to discuss what they've learned from the experience. Families typically find the experience both enjoyable and rewarding in that they are directly influencing future physicians through the telling of their own personal experiences, which is a powerful teaching tool.