UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA
Minneapolis, Minnesota
Team Contact/Coordinator: Julie Hauer, M.D.
E-mail: hauer006@tc.umn.edu
Phone: 612/626-4114
Fax: 612/626-7042
Faculty Development Needs to Address at The Models That Work Conference
Our faculty development need is to find the best and most-efficient way to educate our educators in the community in order to provide a uniformity of clinical experience for our residents and students.
Introduction
The Pediatric Clinical Faculty Program consists of approximately 300 community physicians who volunteer their time to teach ambulatory pediatrics to medical students and pediatric residents. The students and residents travel to the individual clinics to receive their education. These physicians have not necessarily planned on or were ever prepared to be teachers. However, the physicians have found a desire and/or need to give back to the educational community, and are now donating their time, as well as the clinic's time, to do so.
As the Pediatric Clinical Faculty Program has developed, the need to educate the educator has become more of a factor in the pediatric Department's plans to improve and enhance pediatric medical education. As the need to increase ambulatory education program, we would like to support and give back to our volunteering educators.
In the last year and a half, the Pediatric Department has:
• hired a Community Program Associate, Penelope Strater, who holds a Masters of Education degree and administers the clinical faculty program,
• developed a Clinical Faculty Committee consisting of six full-time and six clinical faculty members, and
• re-designed the Clinical Faculty criteria for appointment, continuation and promotion of clinical faculty, to now include both quantitative and qualitative experience in pediatric medical education.
Our next step forward is to develop a faculty education program for the Pediatric Clinical Faculty Program.
Preliminary Needs Assessment
One of the strengths of the University of Minnesota Pediatric Residency Program is the large support from pediatricians in the community. They provide precepting in the setting of a continuity clinic along with other ambulatory experiences. Over 60% of our pediatric residents are assigned to a pediatrician in the community for their continuity clinic experience. This totals 44 preceptors in the community for this important longitudinal clinical experience during pediatric residency training. Our goal is to provide more formal guidance to the preceptors improving their teaching skills (teaching the teachers), further enhancing the relationship between the preceptor and resident, and providing better uniformity of the clinical experience in continuity clinic for all residents.
The Pediatric Department at the University of Minnesota considers clinical faculty development a top priority to maintain excellence in pediatric ambulatory education. We recognize the need to seek our avenues of support for this project in clinical faculty development. By being a pilot team, we can bring increased support to a large number of clinical faculty. This will assure improved exposure to the full breadth of pediatrics to the large number of medical students (300) and pediatric residents (120).
Proposed Implementation
Our goal is to bring the project to the preceptors in the community. We will utilize those recognized for their excellence in teaching to provide modeling and observations of teaching. We will also utilize the Office of Education Resources, Evaluation and Research, headed by Ilene Harris, Ph.D., in developing traveling education workshops and seminars. Other ideas include production of instructional videos and recruitment videos, as well as faculty roundtable sessions with new and experienced preceptors.
The department has already implemented changes to help support this project. We have outfitted and on-line universal evaluation system throughout the community for the pediatric residency program that allows timely evaluations of all clinical experiences along with evaluation of resident performance. This will help facilitate tracking of the outcomes of our faculty development project.
It is imperative that ambulatory education continue to be expanded. Our department continues to benefit from the involvement of the community pediatricians. Hence, creating faculty development is vital to our need for ongoing expansion of the pediatric ambulatory experiences.
Our faculty development team currently consists of James Moller, M.D., Department Chair and Director of Medical Student Education; Penelope Strater, M.Ed., Community Program Associate and Administrator of the Faculty Development project; Julie Hauer, M.D., Pediatric Residency Program Director; Arnold London, M.D., Co-Chair of the Clinical Faculty Committee and Clinical Associate Professor; and Tom Nevins, M.D., Professor and Full-Time Faculty Development Coordinator.
