Want to learn more about Kaiser Permanente's highly competitive tuition-free and lecture-free medical school program? [Show summary]

Dr. Willies-Jacobo describes the foundational values that are woven into the culture at Kaiser Permanente School of Medicine which accepted its first class in the midst of the pandemic. She also shares the challenges and adaptations that have come as a result of establishing a new program during the tumultuous past year. 

KP Tyson: A unique medical school with a dedication to social equity and an emphasis on small group learning [Show notes]

Our guest today is Dr. Lindia Willies-Jacobo, Senior Associate Dean for Admissions and Equity, Inclusion, and Diversity at the Kaiser Permanente Bernard J. Tyson School of Medicine, which welcomed its first class in the summer of 2020 and in the midst of the pandemic. While the Kaiser Permanente School of Medicine may be new, Dr. Willies-Jacobo is not at all new to the field of Med School Admissions. 

She earned her MD at UCSD and served as a professor of pediatrics from 1992-2019. For 22 of those years, she was also the Assistant Dean for Diversity and Community Partnerships and Director of the program in Medical Education, Health, and Equity.

Can you give us an overview of the Kaiser Medical School curriculum, focusing on the more distinctive elements? [1:55]

Absolutely, happy to do that. We just welcomed our inaugural class a year ago, last July, in the midst of a pandemic. We certainly did not anticipate that, but I think in terms of some unique features of the school, I think perhaps the most distinct one would be that we are a non-lecture based school. So we perhaps are, if not one of the only ones, the only school whereby all of our learning takes place in small groups of eight. Because we welcomed 50 students, there is one group of 10 students. So it is non-lecture-based, problem-based learning. It's all integrated. As prospective students may have read, we've decided not to go with the sort of typical departments as there are at many schools. But instead, we have three pillars, our Department of Biomedical Science, our Department of Clinical Science, and our Department of Health System Science. So all learning is integrated across all three pillars.

The other couple of distinct features about our school is that we were really built on kind of the foundational principles of equity, inclusion and diversity, which means that it is fully baked into the fabric of the school. We also are teaching anatomy in somewhat of a future facing forward thinking way. We are not using, the students will not be or have not been, dissecting cadavers, but instead we're leveraging technology so that anatomy is being taught by way of augmented and virtual reality. And then I'll just close by saying that our school has curricularized well-being. So we have a pretty significant and robust well-being curriculum. It's called REACH, which stands for Reflection, Education, Assessment, Coaching, and Health and Wellbeing. So every medical student is actually paired with a physician coach, who is helping them along their journey in terms of developing their professional identity. So those are a couple distinct areas.