New Elective for Med Students Gives Credit for Parenting, Caregiving

The University of Minnesota Medical School is offering an elective that lets medical students who are new parents or the primary caregivers for a family member earn credit for their caregiving experiences.

Emily Cunningham, a third-year medical student at the school, took the “new parent/caregiver” elective in July. Her second child was due in May, and she was scheduled for a surgery rotation starting 4 weeks postpartum. Her advisor recommended the elective instead, and helped her make the change.

“And so that was really, really huge for me and for my family,” Cunningham told MedPage Today. Without the elective, she said, she would have likely taken the whole year off and restarted her third year again afterwards.

“As a student, there’s not a lot of options because you’re not making any money,” Cunningham said. “The elective really was a fantastic option for myself and for our family to just make sure that I was still on track for graduation, but also able to get credit for some of the work that I was already doing with childcare.”

Though dozens of family medicine, pediatrics, and internal medicine residencies offer this type of programming, the University of Minnesota Medical School may be the only allopathic medical school to do so. The Des Moines University Medicine and Health Sciences College of Osteopathic Medicine also has a similar elective.

In residencies, these electives have often been a way for new parents to take paid leave and spend time with their new child, while still bringing back knowledge from the experience to share with the medical community.

The elective at the University of Minnesota was created in 2020 when a student asked Kristina Krohn, MD, an internal medicine & pediatrics hospitalist, why the school didn’t have something that was similar to what residencies with a pediatric element were already doing. Krohn and the student worked together to design the 2- or 4-week class, which is worth two to four credits and taken in the third or fourth year of medical school. (Krohn noted that new parents often end up taking extra time off apart from the elective.)

Requirements for the elective include meeting with the course director for 1 hour a week, writing a short weekly reflection on their online learning platform, and, at the end, sharing information from what they learned with other medical students and residents in a “Tweetorial, blog post, narrative medicine piece, or a presentation to their peers or students,” according to the class syllabus.

Krohn said that these presentations are very well-attended. “There are always, like, 30 residents and students in the room, and it’s always a robust conversation,” she noted, adding that conversations have centered on breastfeeding, postpartum disorders, and sleep.

“There is no better way to see child development, especially in those first early weeks to months,” she added.

Cunningham said breastfeeding came up a lot in her weekly reflections. “Before you have kids, you’re just like, ‘yes, breastfeeding is the recommendation, everyone should breastfeed,’ and you kind of underestimate how difficult it can be and how grueling.” Ultimately, she ended up presenting on how to introduce a new baby to a family with older siblings.

Cunningham noted that she has already used skills learned as a parent with patients. In one example, she was able to coax a 4-year-old who hated showing her stomach into allowing her to examine an appendectomy incision by asking if the girl’s stuffed toy, a puppy, could take a look. “The rotation really focuses on just that — like in just taking care of your children, you’re already gaining so much knowledge that you can translate into clinical practice.”

Krohn said that one student’s presentation included taking his child to the hospital for phototherapy for jaundice, something that she said is “quite possibly the most straightforward hospital admission, but it’s at such a time — it’s days into the kiddo’s life, it’s such an emotional time period.” Even though the student knew it was a straightforward admission, the experience provided him with the opportunity to relate better to “how jarring that is to a family.”

One student at Western Michigan University’s medical school in Kalamazoo posted a link to the course description on X, writing, “As a med student who had 2 children during med school I’m often asked what kind of support I need, and besides the obvious like childcare, I never had a good answer. This elective at the University of Minnesota is the definition of support, all med schools should take notes.”

Since then, Krohn said, she’s received a number of messages sharing the post with her, including one from the Association of American Medical Colleges.

She also noted that every year, students or faculty contact her, asking how they can implement a similar elective at their schools. “I’ve had a bunch of conversations with people this fall, particular deans of medical schools this fall have heard about it, and they’re like, ‘what are the logistics?’ So hopefully next year [there] will be a bunch [of] new [ones].”

Krohn said that there are plans to publish a paper on the elective in the coming months.

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