A New “Community-Embedded” Medical School – Dr. Brigham Willis, University of Texas at Tyler School of Medicine

The first thing you see when you walk into the medical school building at the University of Texas at Tyler is a teaching kitchen, and the director of the nutrition curriculum is a dietician from the East Texas Food Bank. That should give you some idea of how differently the school’s founding Dean, Dr. Brigham Willis, sees its mission. “What we're trying to do is create a very unique program focused on how we can serve the particular needs of East Texas,” he tells host Shiv Gaglani. And in a region that has some of the highest rates of obesity, diabetes, and smoking in the country, that means focusing on lifestyle medicine. “Our students are actually going to have the opportunity to become nutrition coaches and personal trainers which I think is really foundational to what we're trying to do. Instead of just saying, “eat better," they're going to have actual strategies and be a connection to resources to be able to help patients do that.” It also means being deeply embedded in the community in everything they do, and recruiting students from the region to increase the chances that they will eventually practice there and help reduce a physician shortage. From limiting lectures in favor of active learning, to requiring students to become certified EMTs in the first six weeks, to pushing to make education tuition free for all students, Dr. Willis and his team are taking full advantage of the opportunity to build a medical education from the ground up, as you’ll learn in this fascinating episode. Mentioned in this episode: https://medicine.uttyler.edu