As the National Medical Commission (NMC) plans to introduce the family adoption programme (FAP) as part of MBBS curriculum to improve healthcare in rural areas, the Department of Community Medicine at the Government Medical College, Alappuzha, finds it validation for its own half-a-decade-old initiative of MBBS students adopting village families to take care of their health needs.
The NMC proposal makes it mandatory for MBBS students from the first year to adopt around five families. The Department of Community Medicine at the medical college has been running a similar programme FRIENDS.COM (Family visits Regular for Insight and Empathy to Needs and Diseases in Society. Community Orientation for Medical Students), where two to three MBBS students are assigned to an adopted family.
Ever since the start of the programme in 2016, the department is adopting between 50 and 60 families in the district every year. As part of FRIENDS.COM, students visit families of bedridden patients or people having chronic illnesses at regular intervals. They establish rapport and identify the physical, psychosocial, emotional needs of individuals and caregivers and prepare a care plan for individuals and families and follow them up.
"FRIENDS.COM helps students get a real picture of the community. Visiting bedridden patients and their families help them identify various problems of a person with long-term illness. The interaction of students with the person in his/her natural setting unfolds an opportunity to have insight into needs and diseases in society. Such exposures bring out the innate empathy and help them to acquire problem-solving skills in a setting different from the hospital," says Sairu Philip, professor and head, Department of Community Medicine, Government Medical College, Alappuzha.
The concept of FRIENDS.COM was evolved from the experience of the Karunyam Community Based Palliative Care Unit, an initiative of students of the medical college, launched in 2009.
"Dr. Lohidas and Dr. K. J. Mathew were the first to initiate family health study and follow up study in the 1970s. Later, Dr. K. Rajan and other Professors in community medicine gave a lot of importance to this. The initiation of Karunyam helped students to be involved with caring for bedridden patients. By 2016, the students involved in Karunyam felt that all students need to be introduced to the care of patients with chronic illness in the community. This resulted in the launch of FRIENDS. COM," Dr. Philip says.
The programme has been included in the curriculum in 2016 and it is mandatory for students to be part of it. The students need to make a clinico-social case presentation based on their adopted families as part of the community medicine examination. "It helps us to understand the community better and plays an important role in the development of a medical student," says Parvathy B. a former student who was part of FRIENDS.COM.
