Compared to college students in other disciplines, medical students are more likely to experience mental health issues, such as anxiety, depression and burnout due to demanding academic workloads in high pressure environments. Drexel’s College of Medicine is ensuring students have access to comprehensive mental health resources, even as they train across diverse clinical locations throughout Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Delaware and California.
A growing number of medical colleges, including Drexel, utilize a regional medical campus model in response to a demand for more physicians nationally and to maintain or grow enrollment amid concerns of teaching hospital closures, particularly in rural areas of the country.
As the college’s growing landscape creates more varied clinical opportunities for students, this expansion presents a challenge: how do you ensure students have vital mental health resources when they’re many miles away from campus?
The answer may be found in telehealth, including counseling, 24/7 on-demand therapy, psychiatry appointments and health coaching. Drexel’s recent success offering these options, including use by roughly half of the students in the MD program and improvements in reported student satisfaction with mental health resources eight months after announcing the new offerings, was recently outlined in an article in the journal Academic Medicine. The Drexel News Blog recently asked lead authorBisan Salhi, MD, PhD, an associate professor and senior associate dean, and senior author Seema Baranwal, MD, a professor and William Maul Measey Chair in Medical Education, both in Drexel’s College of Medicine, why mental health services are so critically needed beyond campus and what successes they’ve seen from expanding mental health services beyond what is offered on campus.
What is it about medical school that is so tough on mental health for many students?
Baranwal: Medical school comes with high demands on time and energy. The amount of medical knowledge to be learned is expanding at an exponential pace, and medical students feel the demands of this pace acutely. In addition to the responsibility that clinical work and the welfare of patients place on medical students, the time and sleep demands often mean less time for exercise, self-care, family and friends. Medical students are at a higher risk for mental health issues than their age-matched peers and that of the general population, yet they may have less time to address these concerns. Finally, the culture of medicine, while changing for the better, often has a hidden curriculum that sacrifice is noble in some way.
Why are multiple service offerings so important to address the needs of modern medical students?
Baranwal: Students are used to receiving services online and on-demand. For example, they are often rewatching didactic videos late at night or while traveling to a clinical campus. The ability to have after-hours (evenings, weekends) counseling appointments and various modalities of treatment, including psychiatry appointments and health coaching, is crucial to reach the widest possible group of medical students who need these services. Those who may have been reluctant in the past because they were intimidated to ask for time off from a clinical rotation can now readily access counseling at their convenience. This broadening of access has been a game-changer for our students.
What are the advantages of these offerings?
Salhi: This definitely expands the diversity of practitioners available to students. We have a very diverse student body and concordance between patient and practitioner is important (whether along gender, racial, ethnic lines, etc.). The telehealth platform also allows students to seek care at hours that are convenient to them, especially with their busy clinical schedules in the 3rd and 4th years.
Can you speak about why these services are uniquely valuable to our students to “meet them where they are,” especially as DUCOM’s educational model places students all over the country?
Salhi: As the largest allopathic medical school in the country with campuses across the US, we needed mental health services for our students with as few barriers as possible. The introduction of telehealth to their resource offerings has reduced barriers to student access including time zone differences, licensing requirements across states, etc. Our goal in reducing these barriers is to lift the burden off students in obtaining care and allowing them to focus on the demands of medical school in front of them.
Why is it important to offer resources like these?
Baranwal: Our students are chosen for their compassion, intelligence, scientific curiosity and civic engagement. DUCOM students are unique in that they care deeply for their community, their patients and one another. They deserve every resource to ensure their success and well-being, so they can be the amazing physicians they are set out to be!
Reporters interested in talking with Salhi and/or Baranwal should contact Greg Richter, an assistant director of media relations, at 215-895-2614 or gdr33@drexel.edu.
