In early October 2021, Yale School of Medicine (YSM) announced the launch of a pilot Student Mental Health & Wellness Program for its MD, MD-PhD, Physician
May 28, 2021
Training students to care for transgender and non-binary patients
A woman, who was assigned male at birth, is diagnosed with prostate cancer. This was a recent clinical training exercise from Yale’s Physician Assistant Online (PA Online) Program involving standardized patients who are transgender women. At Yale School of Medicine (YSM), MD, PA Online, and Physician Associate (PA) degree programs incorporate curricular content to train students to care for transgender and non-binary patients competently and compassionately. Importantly, the programs are committed to ongoing curricular assessment and revisions.
YSM began the process of meaningfully including such content into its MD curriculum in 2014, as part of a larger collaborative effort between students and faculty to evaluate and increase content related to sexual and gender minority (SGM) medicine. This involved carefully examining the curriculum to determine what was and was not being covered, based on nation
March 16, 2021
PA Online Class of 2023
“This video shows the support involved in your education.” Associate Professor James Van Rhee, MS, PA-C, director of Yale School of Medicine’s (YSM) Physician Assistant Online (Yale PA Online) Program, made this remark during the March 12, 2021 White Coat Ceremony for the PA Online Class of 2023, the program’s fourth cohort. The comment was in response to a video montage of images of each of the 81 members of the class putting on their white coat, often with the help of family or friends. The wide variation of landscapes in the backgrounds of students’ videos vividly portrayed the geographic diversity of the class, which has students from 26 states, almost a quarter of whom live in rural communities. Because the White Coat Ceremony had to take place virtually due to COVID-19 restrictions, the video was created to substitute for the past practice of YSM faculty “coating” each student in a ceremony on Yale’s campus.