First-year medical students are getting hands-on experience in working with older adults through an art program sponsored by the National Institutes of Health’s National Institute on Aging.
The program is based on research showing that students who interact with older adults early in their medical training develop better attitudes toward aging.
Through the course, called “Vital Visionaries,” 15 first-year medical students and 15 healthy adults over age 65 from The OASIS Institute studied art in four two-hour sessions at the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis. Each medical student was randomly paired with an older adult in the first class; working together, they made various pieces of art inspired by the St. Louis Collects exhibition, which highlights contemporary art collections of St. Louisans.
The School of Medicine was one of five medical schools and museums nationwide to receive $10,000 grants from the NIH for the Vital Visionaries project, conceived by Judith Salerno, M.D., deputy director of the National Institute on Aging.
Stephen Lefrak, M.D., professor of medicine and assistant dean for the Humanities Program in Medicine, developed the course, with the help of Marylen Mann, founder and chairman of the St. Louis-based OASIS, and Bunny Burson, liaison with the National Institute on Aging.
With input from Lefrak, Mann and Burson, local artist and project coordinator Amy Enkelmann-Reed put together the curriculum, which included talks by Mort Hill, who designed collaborative mosaic panels at Confluence Park; and Belinda Lee, who uses color to evoke a mood in her portraits. Enkelmann-Reed also gave a lecture on Chuck Close, a painter, photographer and printmaker.
Lefrak said the program is a pilot to see how students and old-er adults respond. The goal is to spark interest in geriatric medicine to improve future doctors’ attitudes toward older people and to make older people aware of their creative potential.
“Young medical students look at people in their 60s, 70s and 80s as ancient with little vitality and quality of life,” Lefrak said. “How do you get them to see that there is a common ground between them?”
The answer, in this case, is art.
“The medium is the message. We’re not trying to teach students about art, but common humanity,” Lefrak said. “It’s to change their perception and show them they can connect with older people in the same way they connect with friends their own age.”
Lefrak said he hopes that the class will become part of the required curriculum in the next few years.
Although the U.S. population of older adults is increasing, the number of U.S. geriatricians is declining. Recent data show that while 14,000 geriatricians are needed nationally to meet the needs of the elderly population, only 7,500 geriatricians are in practice.
Estimates suggest that 36,000 geriatricians will be needed within 25 years to serve an older American population of more than 70 million.
Karen Levine, an OASIS member since 2003, said she didn’t know what to expect when she signed up for the program.
“But any place that gives me permission to have fun with art, I’m glad to be there,” said Levine, who has a daughter older than her partner, Maggie Young.
Young said she was not excited about the program before it started because she doesn’t consider herself artistic.
“But, I’ve had fun with it, and it’s OK that I’m not artistic,” Young said.
“I found out I’m better at it than I thought.”
Founded in 1982, OASIS offers and creates a wide variety of programs and opportunities for involvement in the community, providing a creative outlet and intergenerational interaction, Mann said. A national nonprofit organization, OASIS serves more than 360,000 members over age 50 through a network of centers in 26 cities.
While many hospitals have community-outreach programs, the Vital Visionaries program is the only one that centers on communication between two age groups.
“This kind of exchange is really rich,” Mann said. “I also think this is saying to older people, ‘You are important, you are valuable and you have something to say.'”
The other medical schools and museums participating in the Vital Visionaries project are Columbia University’s College of Physicians and Surgeons and the Museum of Modern Art in New York; Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine and the Mexican Fine Arts Center Museum in Chicago; the University of South Florida’s Florida Center for Creative Aging in Tampa, and the Tampa Museum of Art and the Salvador Dalí Museum in St. Petersburg; and the University of Florida and the Samuel P. Harn Museum of Art in Gainesville.