Society of Hospital Medicine Launches Med Student Scholarship Program
The Society of Hospital Medicine has launched a new scholarship program to bring the “best and brightest” medical students into the specialty.
The Student Hospitalist Scholar Grant program awards eligible students a $5,000 summer stipend for scholarly work on a project related to patient safety, quality improvement (QI), or other areas relevant to the field of hospital medicine. The program also provides up to $1,500 in travel-related reimbursement for students to attend the SHM annual meeting.
This summer’s inaugural class has three students, all going into their second year of medical school: Frank Zadravecz Jr. of the University of Illinois College of Medicine at Chicago, Miriam Zander of Touro College of Osteopathic Medicine in New York City, and Monica Shah of Wayne State University School of Medicine in Detroit.
“Getting medical students involved is important for us,” says hospitalist Darlene Tad-y, MD, an assistant professor of medicine at the University of Colorado in Denver and chair of SHM’s Physicians in Training Committee. It means “the future of medicine will have people who know how to do this work, people who will be more skilled and effective at this work.”
Dr. Tad-y says it makes sense to merge efforts to recruit the “best and brightest” medical students to HM with QI research. This year’s projects include examinations of post-hospital syndrome and physiologic alarm responses.
The program drew about a dozen applicants in its first year. Over the next few years, SHM hopes to award 10 scholarships each summer.
“QI work is really only getting off the ground broadly with people who’ve been in the field for a really long time,” Dr. Tad-y says. “To have that many students early on in their medical school career already understand some of these concepts and be aware that this is going on, for us, it’s really exciting.” TH