Shyrl Sistrunk: Not Looking Like Every Other Teacher Helps Medical Students Connect to Diverse Patient World

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Shyrl Sistrunk, MD, is a big believer in leading by example. She became a physician, in part, because of a family doctor in her hometown of Orangeburg, SC, who told her to put a white coat on over her summer shorts and come with him on his rounds in the community.

“I followed him around when I was in high school, and I thought – I could do that,” says Sistrunk, who practices internal medicine at Georgetown University Medical Center and is Associate Dean for Curriculum and Assessment at the School of Medicine.

The doctor also kept in touch with her when she went to the University of South Carolina, and before she headed off to the Medical University of South Carolina, in Charleston. Then, when she did a residency at GUMC in internal medicine, she was asked to join the faculty in 1994 by Edmund Pellegrino, MD, professor emeritus of medicine and medical ethics and current chair of the President’s Council on Bioethics, a national advisory board.

“I looked around at the residents and faculty and saw very few people who looked like me – a black woman – and I remember how, when I was a medical student, I wanted to be mentored by black physicians and there was one,” she says. “So I took the position, because I wanted to make an impact on the house staff and the medical students.

“Now, I must say, they also give back to me because I am able to be involved in their lives and learn from them,” Sistrunk says.

She has tried to lead by example in other ways. Sistrunk helped establish GUMC’s Integrated Learning Center, a $5 million facility which opened in 2004, which she directs. There, in what is known as the “standard patient program,” medical students practice their clinical skills on trained actors, who simulate an illness or other physical disorder, in order to improve their diagnostic and communication skills. She has expanded the program every year, in part to prepare medical students for the National Board exams they will need to take by the end of the fourth year, but also to teach the students the value of self assessment and empathy.

“Some students don’t do well with patient actors because they say they can’t suspend reality, but I have figured out that if you evaluate some of these students with live patients, they exhibit the same kinds of behavior,” she says. “When you film those interactions, and sit them down in front of the video, you rarely have to say anything. They see what is amiss.”

And as a “doctor in the trenches” – Sistrunk spends 30 percent of her time in her internal medicine/geriatrics practice – she invites first- and second-year medical students to shadow her, and third- and fourth-year students to provide ambulatory care to her long-established clinical practice.

She wants medical students to understand that the diversity in patients seen in her practice - which Sistrunk says is still not yet seen in the faculty - represents the real world that physicians practice in. “Many people have biases that they are not aware of, and this bit of field work helps shine a little light on these issues. Again, self-assessment is usually all that is needed.

“I try to educate by providing a model – if not good directions,” Sistrunk says with a smile.

By Renee Twombly, GUMC Communications