Campus during the summers of 2008 and 2009

and attended each time by twenty-four to twenty-

eight prospective Indian faculty members from
the ICMR and PHFI. Through Internet chat rooms,
regular videoconferences, and exchange visits,
the program will also provide ongoing support for
graduates as they teach students to tackle India’s
public-health challenges.
“These schools are not going to provide
10,000 new students per year. If they get up to
1,000 per year, that will be huge. But all of them
will have some impact,” says Keusch. And “it all
starts with the quality of the teachers.”

theteachers.”
Other Lives, Better Care
“We want to challenge our doctors-in-training to
see their patients as more than their diagnosis
and management issues,” explains Dr. Rick Gold-
stein, assistant professor of pediatrics at Boston
University School of Medicine. “This means not
only understanding more about their patients’
lives but also about the impressions the patients
have of them.”
A $200,000 grant from the Arthur Vining
Davis Foundations has jumpstarted the Other
Lives Project for pediatric residents at BUSM.
The program’s goal is to develop compassion-
ate, sensitive physicians with caring attitudes by
infusing residency training with opportunities
to become acquainted with a variety of children
and families.
The project, led by Goldstein and other doc-
tors from BU and the Boston Combined Resi-
dency Program in Pediatrics, includes developing
competency measures for caring attitudes, as
BUMC Chief of Pediatrics Barry Zuckerman, flips through a picture book with a young patient
as part of Reach Out and Read
well as field experiences, with residents visiting
patients—both locally and through BUSM’s Leso-
tho, Africa, and La Paz, Bolivia, programs—with
lifestyles much different from their own.
Other Lives was created in response to what
Goldstein sees as a major tension in residency
training: the high volume of patients who are
hospitalized for a short time and the mountains
of paperwork. Says Goldstein, “We are trying
to support physicians’ ideals and cultivate the 5
skills needed to care for a child and family at a
profound level.”
–Andrea Baird (COM’05), Kelly Cunningham, Natalie
Jacobson McCracken, Alyce Nicolo (COM’07)