Issue date: 2/22/08 Section: News

Media Credit: Jake Lacey Second year medical students Hannah McLeod, left, and Stephen Pike look through footage of their video before editing it yesterday in the UMC library. McLeod and Pike are working on a video about a child with cancer and an amputated leg.

For some, cancer is a death sentence.

For Daniel Shapiro, it was an inspiration.

Motivated by his fight with the aggressive disease over a decade ago, the associate professor of clinical psychiatry sought a way to bring the human side of medicine to UA medical students.

The College of Medicine Video Slam project was born.

In direct contrast to usual medical training, the project allows groups of second-year students to film their patients in order to tell the personal side of an illness or hospital stay, Shapiro said.

"The in-patient and out-patient work is typically brief," he said. "This is what physician training is lacking."

After filming their patients for about six months, the two-to-three-person groups must condense their footage, usually several hours worth, into a short seven-minute film.

Such arduous editing requirements are necessary because they require students to spend time looking over their footage, said Steven Pike, a second-year medical student and current participant.

"The editing process is really difficult," he said. "Everything the patient says is gold, so it's tricky to get all the right elements."

Filming is tricky because of the balancing act needed in the process. If too much footage is filmed, students can feel overwhelmed. If too little footage is taken, students may not have captured enough valuable material, said Serena Jain, a second-year medical student and current participant.

After the final films were submitted in the program's pilot year, 2006, more than 80 doctors, nurses and medical students crammed into a conference room to watch the footage, Shapiro said.

"This was my first hint that the project might be more popular than I realized," he said.

The films were also shown to other second-year medical students at the college in the fall.

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