University at Buffalo (UB)
Published August 2, 2013 This content is archived.
UB medical students made their mark on the annual AMA-MSS meeting, where one was elected to the national governing council and another co-authored an amendment that passed overwhelmingly.
C.J. Cancino, an MD/MBA candidate, won a contested election for vice chair of the American Medical Association Medical Student Section.
His duties include helping the chair manage the section and serving as a liaison to its committees and leaders.
Cancino’s national position adds to his leadership in the AMA-MSS locally and statewide.
Among his roles, Cancino served as New York State task force chair for membership and recruitment in 2011.
Kristine So, a member of the class of 2014, saw the resolution she co-wrote—which calls for an increased focus on ethics education in medical school curricula—pass by a wide margin.
So and her co-authors were inspired to write the resolution when they learned of the disparity in ethics education at medical schools around the country.
“Medical schools devote anywhere from two to 200 hours to teaching ethics,” said So, former chair of the AMA-MSS’s National Standing Committee on Bioethics and Humanities.
“It seems preposterous that where you attend medical school dictates how prepared you are to deal with ethical dilemmas.”
The resolution next goes to the interim meeting of the AMA-MSS. If approved by the AMA’s House of Delegates, the AMA would draft and publish guidelines that medical schools could use when fashioning or updating the ethics component of their curricula.
In addition to Cancino and So, four other UB medical students attended the conference: George Techiryan, Howard Soh, Mark Diiulio and Anthony Turner, all of the class of 2016.
“Going to these conferences is a great learning opportunity,” said Turner, who is co-president, with Diiulio, of UB’s AMA-MSS chapter.
“You meet the movers and shakers from the next generation of physicians, and you get to see how the AMA plays a role in making policy.
“We all came back feeling very enlightened.”
A UB medical student who could not attend the meeting still played a significant role in it: Trevor York, class of 2016, reviewed a resolution about the potential benefits of a unified database of electronic medical records.
In all, nearly 600 medical students attended the meeting, which took place June 13-15 in Chicago.
They considered more than 30 business items and participated in educational programs on leadership, advocacy, community service, health care models and systems, and career development.