Mini-Sessions

During this past week or two, TDI has hosted a couple voluntary mini-sessions on special topics of interest for students to broaden their understanding and skill. The first one was on media relations and Dr. Bruce Dan (former ABC News Health Editor, former Senior Editor of JAMA, and founder of WebMD) came up from D.C. for a couple days to teach us skills that would help us best communicate health information with journalists, broadcasters, and other media outlets. One of the highlights of the session was watching all of his video clips on what to do and what not to do while on camera! He was very engaging and we all came away with increased confidence to project our message to the media and ultimately the general public.

The other mini-session was on clinical trials and was hosted by Dr. Jon Lurie, a faculty member of TDI and Dartmouth Medical School. He and several other local experts lectured on various aspects of clinical trials over the course of four days, including drug and medical device development, the placebo effect, consent forms, challenges in attaining validity, etc. One of the most interesting takeaways of this session was learning about the intricacies of developing and running a randomized, controlled clinical trial. Dr. Lurie and Judi Forman had gained great expertise from assisting with the design and management of SPORT, and offered excellent insight for those of us who might want to get involved in future clinical trials research. Overall, it was a great week of relaxed learning with no grades and lots of knowledge building!

--Jared Conley

Finals behind me

With finals behind me, I realize just how much we've learned over the past two terms: a lot of weighty, important, and novel concepts relating to health problems facing the U.S., ideas for better policy, approaches to improving health services, and upstream determinants of public health. We've been given the skills to measure the supporting information and communicate this new-found knowledge.
What we have gained is nothing short of impressive, and it's a good thing, because the road ahead is daunting. There are more problems than can be discussed over Thanksgiving dinner (I tried), and the solutions are more complex than a turkey and pie-sated public can wrap their heads around (I tried that, too...). Fortunately, there is more learning ahead so that we can further equip ourselves for the change-making down the road.

-Matthew H. Davis

The Dartmouth Atlas

The Dartmouth Atlas is the foundation of TDI.
Check it out here.

-Sam