good hospital=good medical school?

[autobot]

I realize alot of us (or the fortunate few) are currently looking for ways to analyze which medical schools are better than others. People are looking at rankings, locations, etc. I noticed many of these medschool A vs. medschool B threads. Do you SDNers feel that a highly ranked hospital/highly ranked specialties reflects the quality of the associated medical school? What are some instances that this is false? Does good healthcare not always equal good medical instruction? This question came about when I was looking at the US news best hospital rankings and noticed that several of the top hospitals are associated with some top ten med schools and some not.

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[SunnyS81]

Usually this trend is true, but I wouldn't say always......also the key to the quality of your last two years in medical school will be the quality of the internal medicine and general surgery programs (even if you specialize in derm or something, you'll spend much more time in the above departments).

One example of good hospital and comparitively bad med school is Mayo from what I hear.......students aren't given an opportunty to learn in the last two years since no patient goes to Mayo expecting to be seen by a med student (or even a resident)

I don't know too much about hospitals, but I'm sure there are some out there who can give examples.........I don't think any med school has a BAD hospital.......just comparitively bad......

 

[Gleevec]

Sometimes the best hospitals are so resident-powered that med students do little more than scut. If you end up asking med students where they do the most actual medical work, 95% of the time they will say when they are at the underfunded, public hospital. Because there, med students are actually needed for the hospital to run.

The cushy private hospitals often have swarms of residents to work on the patients, so med students are needed less and thus do less.

This is the impression I got from interviews.

So if you hear about rotations at a public hospital (ie the VA) listen up, because from what Ive been told that is where you learn the most.

 

[efex101]

I do not think that the above statement about Mayo is totally true. I have spoken with MS3 and MS4 and it really depends on two things as far as what exposure you get during these years: a) the attending and residents supervising the specific rotation and b) how motivated/hung-ho/assertive that you are. Yes, Mayo does see a lot of special cases but it also gets a lot of bread and butter cases from the area. Bottom line is that if *you* do want to learn a procedure or what have you Mayo will facilitate this. I think this is true for almost every hospital affiliated with a medical school. It boils down to who is in charge at the time that you do your clerkship and how willing you are to learn or get a lot of hands on. Mayo medical school graduates are doing very good as far as residency placement so I do not think that they are not getting enough training is correct. I will let you know for sure if I end up at Mayo next year.

 

[kito]

Originally posted by Gleevec
underfunded, public hospital

Kings County baby.

 

[Smitty75]

Originally posted by ankitovich
Kings County baby.

I'll see you there

 

[usmaple]

I've interviewed at a pretty wide range of schools, and I've developed the impression that at the schools with well-known, high-ranked hospitals you can get good first-hand clinical experience, but you generally have to be aggressive to grab a bigger slice of the pie from fellows, residents, and other students. In places with less heralded facilities (Downstate/King's County definitely comes to mind), you're just expected to take a much bigger role in patient care during the rotations.

In terms of which set-up is better, I think it depends on your goals (e.g. academic vs. clinical) and your personality (e.g. passive vs. assertive/aggressive).