Pulling Down the Barriers

By Peter Nichols

Last fall, Thomas Jefferson University announced a first-ever partnership that would enable medical students at Catholic University of the Sacred Heart in Rome to earn a baccalaureate degree from Jefferson and medical degrees from SKMC and Catholic University—all in six years. Graduates of the program would be able to practice in the United States and the European Union. “For the first time, a European student can come to the U.S., study here, and then take the credits back for a European degree,” notes Peter Scoles, MD ‘70, vice dean for Academic Program Development. “That’s the big significance.”

Scoles is professor of Orthopaedics at SKMC. Before Jefferson, he was senior vice president for Assessment Programs at the National Board of Medical Examiners. Prior to that, he was assistant dean at Case Western Reserve University College of Medicine. He is a retired captain in the U.S. Navy. We talked to Scoles about his work at Jefferson and the new partnership with Catholic University.

The Bulletin: Tell us about your work as vice dean for Academic Program Development.

Dr. Peter Scoles: I’ve worked in medical education for more than 40 years. In that time, I’ve developed the concept that education is a continuum—each piece should be linked to every other piece. This is a vision I share with Dr. Tykocinski. I have the unique opportunity at Jefferson to combine our undergraduate medical education programs with our graduate medical education programs and to bring the educational process of the physician into a unity. The collaboration with Catholic University is one aspect of that continuum project. It brings a unity to U.S. education and to European Union education, which hasn’t previously existed. 

TB: What is it that you’re trying to unify?

PS: In most of the world, with few exceptions, the medical degree is a technical or professional degree. Immediately after high school, you enter a six-year curriculum that focuses exclusively on medical knowledge and skills. The U.S. medical education program is unique. We have four years of college, followed by four years of medical school. The richness we have in our undergraduate curricula involves humanities programming, and that’s absent in the international medical education environment. The new collaboration will give a select group of Catholic University students access to that portfolio.

TB: How do the humanities enrich medical education and make a better doctor?

PS: The humanities aren’t a course—they’re a way of life. They’re an approach to yourself and how you relate to others. Medicine is a skill doctors bring to how they approach others, so medical education should be more than the science. The humanities shape doctors who not only are prepared to listen, but who expect to listen. It’s part of who they are. They synthesize what they hear, reflect on it, and then are able to say, “Based on all these things, here’s what I think we ought to do next. What do you think?” That’s probably a different experience than the one you have in a physician’s office right now. Our incoming classes increasingly are being composed of students selected because they have scientific abilities as well as a background in other kinds of things. That’s what the life of the humanities is about.

TB: Tell us about the agreement Jefferson reached with Catholic University.

PS: In the European Union, the content of the curriculum for a medical degree is highly regulated. Anybody who has a medical degree has completed these particular 360 credit hours, and the degree is transportable across borders within the E.U. A U.S. medical degree is not transportable into the European Union, and credits earned at a U.S. university cannot be credited toward an E.U. degree. What we’ve done is establish the protocols for credit transfer between the two universities, Jefferson and Catholic University, and we’ve obtained permission from the Italian Ministries of Education to do this. That hasn’t happened before.

European law and U.S. practical procedure make this a one-way path. At the present time, it would be very difficult for a North American student to enroll in our joint program with Catholic University. The next step is to change that and make it a two-way path.

TB: How does the program work?

PS: A student who’s accepted into this program starts at the Catholic University of Rome and spends one full academic year there. At the end of that first year, they come to the East Falls campus of Jefferson for the summer and take three or four humanities or humanities-related courses toward a baccalaureate degree. They then go back to Rome for their second year of medical studies and return again to East Falls in the summer to take nine credit hours in a principally nonscientific curriculum. Then they go back for their third year at Catholic University. If they meet the academic requirements and pass the first step for our U.S. medical licensing examination, they transfer to Jefferson University and spend a full year, the fourth year of their curriculum, at East Falls taking courses for the baccalaureate degree. At the completion of that year, they’ll be awarded a BS from Jefferson and enroll in the last half of our medical curriculum. They’ll spend years five and six at Sidney Kimmel Medical College and receive a Jefferson MD in May. Then they go back to Rome for two months to finish the capstone requirements for a Catholic University medical degree.

This will be a very highly selective cohort of four to six people, proficient in English and enthusiastic enough to do something very different. They must be willing to have their horizons expanded. It’s not for everybody.

TB: What’s in it for Jefferson?

PS: Everybody has their own vision. What I think is in it for Jefferson is the opportunity to delve deeply into the international educational environment and to begin to anticipate a world 20 years from now when all these barriers go away. We get to help shape that future. It’s an opportunity for us to be a leader in the development of an international curriculum.

Even now, the resources our students use to learn aren’t only what we teach them in our classrooms. They go home. They get online. They use resources from scholars all over the world, and they form their own social-media learning groups that easily contain a student from Thailand and a student from Hungary. They can’t comprehend that there are obstacles. They say, “How can this be? We’re doing this already.” That’s going to make all this stuff go away when they become leaders. We have to anticipate that and make it ready for them. That’s what this is about for us.