The Roy J. and Lucille A. Carver College of Medicine has long sponsored in part the Short Coat Podcast, a series focused on issues related to medical school, largely featuring physicians-in-training and their instructors. But now the college has launched a new podcast with established providers who may need continuing medical education (CME) credit as its audience. Each episode offers listeners the opportunity to obtain CME credit afterward. Financial disclosures, educational objectives, and links to obtain certificates of completion are available on each episode’s webpage.
Rounding@Iowa is hosted by Gerard Clancy, MD, Senior Associate Dean for External Affairs and Professor of Psychiatry. (Clancy delivered an Internal Medicine Grand Rounds on marijuana legalization last month.) In each of the podcast’s first two episodes, Clancy has invited members of the department to discuss issues surrounding the COVID-19 pandemic.
The first episode features Executive Dean Patricia Winokur, MD, professor in Infectious Diseases, and the principal investigator for the University of Iowa’s arm in the clinical trial of the Pfizer-developed vaccine for COVID-19. She and Clancy discuss a range of topics related to the vaccine trials happening around the world, their low-risk side effects, their high degree of safety and effectiveness, and what makes mRNA vaccines unique compared to more conventional vaccines. The reassurances and explanations offered in this episode will be useful for anyone who has questions or even hesitancy about the vaccines. This is one to share on social media.
That belief that the practice of medicine must recognize its role in shaping public health continues into the second episode, “COVID-19 as an Accelerant to America’s Longstanding Health Disparities,” in which Clancy welcomes Martha Carvour, MD, PhD, assistant professor in Infectious Diseases, and Alejandro Pezzulo, MD, assistant professor in Pulmonary, Critical Care, and Occupational Medicine. Each of the two young researchers discuss how their interest in health inequities first arose and how COVID-19 has widened these gulfs among underserved populations. Carvour details the greater incidences of foot amputation she witnesses among minority populations and how systemic racism and bias in the system creates mistrust that must be addressed. Pezzulo describes the first waves of sickened Latinx immigrant populations with connections to the meat-packing industry who came to the Medical ICU as well as the long-term lingering effects of the illness post-COVID he sees in the Respiratory Illness Follow-Up Clinic.
Carvour also offers thoughts on what changes will persist within the health care system and for individuals, post-COVID, whether it is the trauma of survivorship or personal economic collapse, and medicine’s role in addressing these problems as well. “There’s no better time for a broad public health approach, where medicine and public health are working together, to solve a giant structural problem and ensure that not only are we providing care for COVID . . . but some of those other things that we know how to treat, chronic medical conditions or acute conditions, where access to care might be disrupted, we do have a chance now if we try to intervene, to reduce some of those gaps that will continue to widen without our attention.”
Through both episodes, Clancy proves an engaging host, offering his insight but more often letting his guests’ expertise shine through with thoughtful questions. Add Rounding@Iowa to your podcast subscriptions even if you do not need CME.