CRMC Becomes Core Rotation Site For Medical Students

Cookeville Regional now serving as a core site for medical students, providing a place for students to learn and additional expertise for the region.

Gastroenterologist Nicole Pisapia said a core site is the medical facility where students begin their two years of hands-on learning in a hospital. Pisapia said they will be starting their first program next Monday with a group of students from Lincoln Memorial University.

“Now that we’re a core site, we will officially have six students a year that come here and it’s kind of like what we would consider their home base where they get that core, that core knowledge and those general specialties in general parts of medicine and surgery,” Pisapia said. “And then from there they can still do rotations with physicians in all of the specialties that we offer.”

Pisapia said the hospital will benefit from the arrangement because new students keep physicians sharp, benefit the community, and are likely to come back to work at the hospital in the future. She said the change came about thanks to student demand, as many students on different rotations at the hospital were asking why the hospital was not a core site.

“The students were asking, again, because they would like to be able to to come here to be stationed here and so I just approached our CEO, Buffy Key, and I said, you know, ‘Hey, is this something that you’re interested in?'” Pisapia said. “And she actually told me that she has a ton of physicians coming to her all the time asking her, you know, why don’t we take medical students, can we be a core site, and she just really needed somebody – like some member of the medical staff which is a physician, to kind of take the project on, and so it kind of just fell in my lap and here we are.”

She said Lincoln Memorial was chosen for the first program because the hospital was already precepting various students from the university for clinical rotations.

“We’ve been precepting medical students here for elective GI rotations essentially since we came here and then students kept asking if we could become a core site because many of them are from Cookeville or the region and, you know, it’s just a really great medical center, so that’s kind of how it all started,” Pisapia said.

Pisapia said the hospital is suited to educate these six students in the osteopathic medicine program because there are a lot of Doctors of Osteopathic Medicine (DO) on the hospital’s medical staff.

“Multiple of us are alumni of LMU, and so I think that we have the opportunity to precept them from that perspective of medicine, but the gap between MD and DO worlds has really narrowed and essentially is closing at this point,” Pisapia said.

Pisapia said the program will also improve the experience for patients in the hospital.

“It makes people feel special to be seen by, you know, more than one type of person in the medical field,” Pisapia said. “They get extra attention, and the feedback so far from all the patients that I’ve had engage with medical students has always been really receptive and excited.”