2W: Pediatric Patient and Family Engagement Consultation Service

School of Medicine

This elective involves working with a multidisciplinary consultation team devoted to engaging pediatric patients and their families in managing their health through educational interventions and health information technologies. Consultations focus on understanding the health-related needs of the families of hospitalized pediatric patients and developing strategies to meet those needs based on patient and parental characteristics, capacities, and preferences. With each new consultation, students will independently evaluate the patient and family, present the case to a multi-disciplinary team, explore resources to address their health-related needs, and work with the family to implement the proposed solutions during hospitalization. Medical students will work with a variety of pediatric providers in the inpatient and acute care settings, and they will learn to educate and support families with new diagnoses and chronic illnesses using apps, the My Health at Vanderbilt patient portal, or other technologies and educational tools. At the end of this rotation, the student will have an appreciation of the broad array of health-related needs that challenge the families of ill children, an understanding of the concept of patient activation and its role in patient and family engagement, and familiarity with use of education and health information technologies in the promotion of health and management of disease. Students will have unique opportunities to learn about a broad array of barriers to optimal care, to gain experience with assessing and managing social determinants of health, and to impact directly the care of the families involved in the consultations.