San Juan Bautista School of Medicine's Experience in the Aftermath of Hurricane Maria.

The San Juan Bautista School of Medicine (SJBSM) is located in Caguas, Puerto Rico. On September 20, 2017, Hurricane Maria hit the island, making landfall as a Category 4 storm. The extreme wind force and rainfall caused extensive power outages and other damage. In this Invited Commentary, the authors discuss SJBSM's actions and lessons learned in the aftermath of Hurricane Maria.By September 25, SJBSM had contacted students to ensure their safety and identify their immediate needs. The medical school's primary goal was to restore services as expeditiously as possible. By October 9, SJBSM had reopened and adjusted its offerings and practices to accommodate students' needs. The medical school worked to support students' emotional and physical well-being as well as meet their academic needs. First- and second-year students who could not be present received recorded lectures, study guides, assessments, and other materials electronically or via hard copy. Third- and fourth-year students were authorized to complete a single clerkship rotation at another medical school in the United States. During this time, SJBSM consulted with the Association of American Medical Colleges, the Liaison Committee on Medical Education, and other academic agencies. These groups offered advice on how to proceed given the hardships the medical school faced.Since then, SJBSM has applied lessons learned from Hurricane Maria and taken measures to ensure that it can meet the needs of faculty, staff, and students in the immediate aftermath of future disasters.

Testing 300 patients for alpha-1 antitrypsin deficiency in Caguas, Puerto Rico.

Alpha-1 Antitrypsin Deficiency (AATD) is an inherited disorder that can cause lung and liver disease in adults and children. Homozygosity for the Z phenotype is the principal cause of AATD. There are about 100,000 people with AATD in the United States (not including the Island of Puerto Rico), and about the same number in Europe. Despite being one of the most common potentially lethal genetic diseases among Caucasian adults, AATD often remains unidentified, in part because related pulmonary symptoms often do not manifest until midlife when significant pulmonary functional degradation has already occurred. Our study aims to determine what is the prevalence of AATD in a specific population in Puerto Rico.

Peer-teaching: an effective learning experience?

This article describes the peer-teaching strategy applied in the gross anatomy course to first year medical students at the San Juan Bautista School of Medicine.