In the setting of anticipated physician shortages and nationally low fill rates for infectious diseases fellowships, the unique skillset of the ID physician workforce is under future threat.
Strong internal medicine residents often choose other specialties due to personal passions and anticipated lifestyle phenotypes. In a resident survey study from 2016 in Clinical Infectious Diseases, most residents (65%) decided they weren’t going to specialize in infectious diseases prior to their internal medicine residency, which had historically been the field's main area of recruitment focus.
Surveyed ID fellows were more likely to rate their pre-clinical microbiology medical school course as being good or very good, compared with fellows who did not go into infectious disease; and 90% of survey respondents felt that microbiology was influential in decisions related to an eventual ID career path.
At IU School of Medicine, microbiology — now called Host Defense — is the first-year course responsible for introduction to microbes, infectious syndromes, antibiotics and immunology. Essentially everything we — infectious disease specialists — love rolled into a six-week course.
In 2022 and 2023, Margaret E. Bauer, PhD, of the Department of Microbiology and Immunology, led an initiative to overhaul the curriculum due to low student satisfaction scores. Part of this overhaul led to inclusion of clinical ID faculty in case design, curriculum delivery (via recorded lectures focused on real-world application) and small group supervision. This allowed more intimate interactions with the students at a more formative level with the hope of imprinting clinical role models in the setting of real-world cases that highlight the complexity, variety and excitement the specialty can offer.
Since getting engaged in the course in 2023, satisfaction among students rose from 40% to 91% and dissatisfaction fell from 29% to 3%. Faculty members including Mitchell McClean, Haley Pritchard, Jack Schneider, Tuan Tran, Bree Weaver, Samir Gupta, Nicolas Barros, Philip Clapham, Haseeba Khan, Aaron Ermel, John Humphrey, Stephen Jordan and Saira Butt cited engaged students, excellent questions and a collegial atmosphere that fostered growth and excitement about the specialty. Even our fellows got involved!
Students cited the following encouraging reports in their evaluations:
- “I really enjoyed small groups in the 2nd and 3rd blocks. I loved having the infectious disease doctors leading each small group.”
- “I loved the instructors in this course, the infectious disease faculty are some of the most interactive teachers we have had!”
- “I appreciated our facilitators, and I was happy to be able to speak with both infectious disease physicians and basic science faculty about topics related to our small group problems.”
- “I also really liked how there were ID doctors available during small group to answer any clinical questions we had.”
- “It was really cool to have ID doctors there.”
- “I liked and appreciated that we also got time with ID docs during small group to answer questions.”
We are incredibly lucky and grateful to be included in efforts to make the medical school curriculum more engaging. We are grateful for the engaged faculty and students that make us look good, and hopefully, allow us to light the passion of infectious diseases in a new generation of learners.
