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OHSU SCHOOL OF MEDICINE
WHITE COAT CEREMONY
Dean Richardson’s Welcome Remarks
August 17, 2012
1 p.m., OHSU Auditorium
Portland, Oregon
The White Coat: A Promise to Future Patients
Welcome everyone! I am pleased to see all of you here.
Our newest students and I met briefly during the start of their orientation session earlier this week, but this is the first time I have had the opportunity to welcome the families and friends of our newest class.
Thank you all for being here today as we celebrate the OHSU School of Medicine Class of 2016.
I can say without bias that all of our students are special, but this class in particular has historical significance.
This year, we celebrate the 125th anniversary of the OHSU School of Medicine. You are forever associated with this historical milestone.
Since our humble beginnings in 1887, much has changed, and for the better.
During the past 125 years, the OHSU School of Medicine has evolved into one of the world’s leading academic health centers, recognized throughout the world for our important contributions to human health and well-being.
In 1887, we welcomed our first class of 15 students, all men, and surprisingly, from the photos I have seen, almost all fifteen of them had mustaches, and they were likely all from Oregon.
Your entering class this year is 132 students. And while I’m not sure about the mustache count, I can tell you this about your class.
· 74 of you are women, about 56 percent of the class.
· About 65 percent of you are from Oregon, with others from around the country and world.
· All of you come to medical school with significant experience in the health care sector, here in the US and globally, along with experience in areas as diverse as military service to journalism to accounting and agriculture.
You are an exceptional group of individuals; we are proud to have you as our 125th entering class.
Back in 1887, the medical school was housed in a renovated grocery store building in NW Portland – it’s long since been torn down.
We have a few more buildings today – many of them built early in the past century, connecting us to our storied past.
Rising now on the waterfront is a building that symbolizes the promise of our future, a state-of-the-art new medical school – the Collaborative Life Sciences Building. We are building this in partnership with other universities in Oregon.
We’ll open the doors of our new medical school facility next year and some of your education will take place there on the banks of the beautiful Willamette River.
Our historic campus here on Marquam Hill, the tram, and the sleek new buildings are an impressive sight to behold, but we are much more than buildings. We are people.
In 1887, we had a handful of volunteer faculty. Today, our faculty numbers nearly 2,000 – some of the finest educators, physicians and scientists you will find anywhere in the world.
For more than a century, our thousands and thousands of graduates have cared for millions of patients and have made extraordinary contributions that have helped to improve human health.
Their accomplishments are more than the sum of excellence in medicine and science. Our graduates are also leaders in their communities, their country and the world. Oregon’s Governor John Kitzhaber is an alumnus of our school.
Today, as you accept your first White Coat, you become part of this illustrious and rich history, the community that is the OHSU School of Medicine.
The White Coat ceremony is the formal way we welcome you into our community and it marks the first step in the journey to becoming a physician.
In just a little while, each of you will receive your first White Coat, a symbol of our profession.
What does it mean to wear a White Coat? How will it change you? It’s not a super-hero costume suddenly allowing you to leap tall buildings, but it does have a type of power.
A few months ago, an interesting study led by Dr. Adam Galinsky in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology caught my eye.
The study looked at what they call “enclothed cognition” – in other words, does what you wear affect the way you think or the way you process information?
It caught my eye because they used the physician’s White Coat in their experimental model. Like any good scientific investigation, there were multiple experiments. I’ll share one of them with you.
74 undergraduate students were randomly assigned to one of three options: wearing a physician’s White Coat, wearing a painter’s white coat or simply seeing a physician’s white coat draped over a chair.
After wearing or seeing a White Coat – physician or painter –each student was given a standardized test for sustained attention. The test was a proxy for being an attentive listener, an attribute which is considered key to being a good physician.
The students who wore the physician’s White Coat, which by the way was identical to the painter’s white coat, performed quite a bit better on the tests. Those students who wore the painter’s white coat or were in the group who had only looked at what they were told was the physician’s White Coat did not perform as well.
Multiple versions of this experiment were conducted, and the results were consistent: the group that wore the physician’s White Coat performed best in the subsequent tests.
What does this mean? Well, the investigators concluded that it was the actual wearing of the physician’s White Coat that influenced psychological processes.
No one knows, at this point, if the cognitive effects are sustained – or if they disappear once you take off the coat. (And to maximize attention to my remarks, this suggests I should be speaking after you get your White Coat, not before).
However, here is why I found this study interesting. If the White Coat affects people – people who are not physicians or planning to become physicians – just by putting it on, what is the reverse impact?
What does the physician’s White Coat say about you to your patients? To your friends? To your family?
You’ve all undoubtedly heard about the White Coat effect, how a patient’s blood pressure may rise a bit just due to the nervousness of having it measured.
That’s not what I am talking about.
One of our recent graduates said this to me after her White Coat ceremony: “I didn't expect that patients would put their trust in me from Day One.”
The White Coat changes you, and it changes how the world perceives you. Patients will put their trust in you from Day One.
The White coat is a symbol – or more accurately it is a compact, a promise – not just of the fact that you listen well, but of your compassion for humanity, an outward sign of a profession in which you have chosen to pursue a life dedicated to improving the health and well-being of people everywhere.
For a symbol to retain its power, it must be grounded in reality. That reality is your commitment.
To me, this is what the White Coat ceremony marks today: the moment when you formally enter into that compact between you and your future patients.
Beginning today, just as every graduate has done since 1887, you start on your own journey to earn the implicit trust that accompanies the White Coat.
Whether your journey takes you to family medicine or neurosurgery, no matter what the changes that inevitably will occur in our health care system through the accelerating process of reform, that pact will always remain core to what you will become: A physician.
The promise implied by donning the White Coat today is what it means to be a physician – no matter the context in which you practice.
We at OHSU are privileged to be part of your education. We look forward to learning with you – and from you – over the next four years.
Welcome to the OHSU School of Medicine and to that compact.
Thank you.