Kayla Combs stood at the head of the anatomy lab table surrounded by medical students examining their patient’s musculoskeletal system. “If you pull on this tendon here, it will cause the fingers to move,” Combs demonstrated.
But, the teacher wasn’t a med school faculty member. She was a doctoral candidate in UCF’s physical therapy program participating in an interdisciplinary session designed to better educate future doctors on human anatomy. Combs was one of three PT graduate students serving as teaching assistants during this year’s anatomy lab module.
“It’s a win-win situation,” said Dr. Daniel Topping, who directs the College of Medicine’s anatomy lab and began the physical-therapists-as-educators program. “Physical therapy students get more intensive anatomy training than our medical students because their profession is very anatomy-dependent. They are so knowledgeable and great with the med students that it’s just like having another faculty member.”
The College of Medicine’s anatomy lab module is unique nationally. Cadavers are considered a student’s first patient. First-year medical students don’t just memorize organs and body systems – they become forensic detectives trying to determine their patient’s cause of death. PT students provide additional expertise, Topping said, because they have spent seven months studying in a cadaver lab compared to 17 weeks for med students.
The PT students – Combs, Akash Bali, and Kelly LaMaster – were chosen based on their expertise and teaching experience. They came in every Friday for the four-hour lab and taught under the supervision of Topping and other core and volunteer faculty.
“What’s really good, as physical therapy students, is that we get to open their eyes to what we do and offer them a different perspective on anatomy,” Combs said, “like having them pull on tendons to see what the muscle actually does, actually seeing that it flexes the finger or flexes the toe.”
“And in teaching them, we’re also teaching ourselves,” Combs said. “Our PT labs are purely about identification. For the med students, their lab is much more about investigating and asking questions, as they have to determine the cause of death of their ‘patient.’ So, it’s been fun to see them question things, whether or not an organ looks normal or not, and I learned a lot, too, from that process.”
The PT students said the collaboration was an opportunity to “get inside the mind of med students,” which will give them a better understanding of the physician’s perspective as far as pathologies, clinical diagnoses, and treatment.
“In the future, when we need to talk to a physician about a patient, we will know where the physician’s mind is at or why they made the referral or recommendation,” LaMaster said. “When everyone is on the same page, the better the outcomes are going to be for the patient.”
With the development of UCF’s new Academic Health Science Center (AHSC), which will ultimately bring many UCF health programs to Lake Nona, these types of collaboration are only the beginning of an exciting future for healthcare education. We hope that as healthcare students with diverse specialties learn together, they will also develop better teamwork and communications skills that will improve how they care for their future patients.
As Dr. Patrick Pabian, program director for the Doctor of Physical Therapy program, explained, “Interprofessional collaborations such as these will provide a more well-rounded healthcare provider both for physical therapists and medical doctors. Getting our students working together and becoming familiar with each other as much as possible is paramount because it’s really going to benefit patients in the future.”
