Core Course Week Recap

Greetings again! As I am diving into midterms out here in Copenhagen, I think this is a great time to sit back and reflect on one of the most unique things about DIS, study tours, and core course week.

Last week, my core program and I embarked on a “glorified field trip” to the two different islands of Denmark (Jutland and Funen). This trip was part of something called core course week here at DIS. During this week, all normal classes are put on hold, and you only participate in activities or workshops with your core program. As a quick reminder, I am enrolled in the Human Health and Disease program here! For me, this week consisted of 5 total days of activities. We traveled to the islands of Jutland and Funen from Monday to Wednesday and then attended a patient case workshop and visited a macro-anatomical lab on Thursday and Friday respectively. For this blog post, I am going to give everyone an insight into what all these activities looked like and all the great experiences that I was able to gain from this busy week!

Photo from the bus journey to Jutland!

Jutland/Funen

To begin our core course week, we woke up bright and early on Monday and headed west. Our first stop came on the island of Funen, the island located between Jutland and Zealand (the island where Copenhagen is located). Here we visited the Health Innovation Center of Southern Denmark located in Odense, Denmark’s third-largest city. This visit gave us a sneak peek at how the Danish healthcare system pushes innovation on a very public level. Unlike most medical tech. companies or innovation centers in the United States, this center in Denmark was not operated for profit. This means that they solely work with hospitals or other companies with designs and ideas stemming from issues within the healthcare system. The team at the innovation center, while only around 70 people big, was an incredibly diverse group of people ranging from engineers, psychologists, and doctors. One of the coolest projects we got to see was a new bed that has been designed for psychiatric patients. This bed was extremely heavy (to avoid patients causing any type of self-harm with the bed) and concealed all its wires to provide an appearance of a normal bed, making patients feel much more comfortable!

Exploring the ARoS Modern Art Museum!

After this first visit, we drove up to the city of Aarhus (Denmark’s second-largest city) on the Island of Jutland and spent the night there. The next day started off with a cultural experience rather than an academic one. We got to visit the ARoS Museum of Modern Art before we headed out to our first hospital visit. We drove out of Aarhus to the city of Randers where we visited a gastrointestinal surgeon at Randers Sygehus Hospital. Here we focused on the more specifics of the Danish healthcare system and setup. Topics ranged from the process of medical school, the work-life balance of a Danish doctor, and the impact of COVID-19 on standard practice. The craziest thing to me was that surgeons in Denmark only work 37 hours a week! That is unthinkable compared to the working conditions of surgeons in the United States. Our day ended with us driving to the small town of Herning and completing an escape room as a bonding experience!

We escaped! This was taken at the escape room we participated in, it was a lot of fun!

The final stop of our trip came the following morning with a visit to the cardiology department at Herning Sygehus hospital. Here our discussion focused a great deal on a doctor’s role in the Danish medical system. Doctors and surgeons work in larger teams in Denmark. It is common for a patient to see a different doctor almost every day of a hospital stay. This allows for a wider range of opinions and ideas being discussed when it comes to every patient. Medical malpractice lawsuits are also something not present in the danish system, as the responsibility of care falls on so many professionals. After this stop, we made the long trip back to Copenhagen!

Back in Copenhagen

To finish up our week, we participated in a patient case workshop with other health care students and visited the Panum Research Institute at the University of Copenhagen. The workshop was geared towards teaching us to communicate with people of different pieces of knowledge and backgrounds to attack a medical problem from many different angles. We had students, like myself, who are specializing in clinical care and practice as well as students studying drug design and biotechnology. In a way, this experience mirrored the collaborative spirit of the Danish healthcare system. Finally, our week ended visiting the macro-anatomical lab at Panum. This was a very surreal experience as the number of structures and cadavers that they had on display was more than I had ever seen. We worked together in teams and competed in a scavenger hunt to find different structures and specific specimens of importance. Overall, this was a very fun way to end our week!

The view from the Panum Research Center!

In short, having this weeklong experience to focus solely on our main study of focus was quite unique! This is not something you will find at other study abroad programs. This also provided an incredibly bonding experience for all my core classmates. Nothing brings a group together like an extended weeklong “trip” together! This week also provided us with relative knowledge and background information on the structure of socialized medicine and how it operates within the welfare state that Denmark has. Has me thinking about the possibilities of pursuing medicine abroad!

Till next time, this is Aidan signing off for now! Thanks for reading!

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