DME Bulletin: Vol.5, No.1

Curriculum Development

During the 1997-98 academic year, the Longitudinal Primary Care (LPC) Program became part of the Essentials of Clinical Medicine course, which is a required course for all medical students. For the 1998-99 school year, LPC is recruiting sixty new preceptors in family medicine, pediatrics and general internal medicine. In April, Joyce Smith, MD, discussed the obstacles involved in establishing an LPC program at the annual meeting of the Society of General and Internal Medicine.

Dr. Smith also received a grant from Merck Pharmaceuticals for the CAMEO (Circle Asthma Management/Education Operational) Partnership Project that will create an asthma education program in cooperation with Circle Family Care and the Cook County Ambulatory Care Council.

Annette Yonke has completed a Maternal Child Health grant proposal for the Continuing Education and Development Center that will deliver eleven short courses on-line and a conference through the Great Cities program. She has also completed the final draft proposal for the MHPE on-line project, which, if funded, will present its first course in January 1999. In addition, she is restructuring a proposal for clinical practice guidelines for the recognition and treatment of depression in primary care patients and is doing the preliminary work to apply for a continuing medical education grant in telemedicine.

Educational Programs

Four students graduated from the MHPE program in the past year. Jerry Glenn, MD, PhD completed the program in fall 1997. His thesis was entitled “Development of a Test for Rapid Screening of College-age Students for Learning Disabilities.” Roberta Arnold graduated in spring 1998, having completed her project “Evaluation of Radiologists’ Practice Change Following Eight Hands-on CME Workshops.” Elizabeth Baker, MD, completed her work on her thesis, “Can the Medical Record Be Used to Evaluate Diagnostic Semantic Competence?” in summer 1998. Debra Klamen, MD, graduated in summer 1998. Her project was entitled “Learning Preferences of Medical Students and Their Correlation with Experience of Medical School.” Congratulations to all of the graduates and their committees.

International Programs

The Spencer Foundation has awarded Ara Tekian $283,700 for a three-year grant entitled “Paths to Diversity in Medical Education.” The study seeks to identify the practices in medical education most likely to increase the proportion of underrepresented minorities attending and graduating medical school. The project includes the review of underrepresented minority admissions, tracking their undergraduate and medical school progress and completion of their residency training. Eight medical schools will be studied, including two each from the eastern, western, midwestern, and southern regions of the United States.

The Short Course Series for International Health Professions Educators, offered June through August, attracted the participation of international leaders from diverse countries, inspiring spirited exchanges and laying the groundwork for sustained collaborative research. The courses were organized into four subseries: Curriculum and Instruction; Assessment, Evaluation, and Decision Making; Management and Leadership; and Research.

The MHPE Program in Brazil began the first of four intensive course sessions on August 31. DME faculty members Ara Tekian, Annette Yonke, and Michael Seefeldt comprised the first delegation offering on-site instruction in Marilia, Brazil to the 19 candidates from 5 Brazilian medical schools. The next course session will be held in Londrina, Brazil in December.

Medical Humanities

The medical humanities program begins the 1998-1999 academic year with several changes in personnel.

Barbara F. Sharf, Ph.D., a former head of the program, has left UIC to work as professor in the communications department and the medical humanities program of Texas A & M University in College Station, Texas. Barbara came to UIC in 1978 and worked in medical humanities since 1984. During that time, she was instrumental in revitalizing the Realities of Medicine course, which offered students a broad array of mini-electives in topics ranging from hospice care to prison health care to medicine on the radio. Her research career reached a high point at UIC with a multi-year grant from the Department of Defense to study the educational and social implications of the ways in which various media represent breast cancer. Barbara leaves behind a long legacy of committee service, having had a hand in shaping courses, hiring personnel, advising students, and recommending policy. While we will miss her dedication to the program, we hope Barbara enjoys her new career opportunities as much as her new freedom from a very long daily commute.

Margaret Moon, M.D., who has worked with the medical humanities since September of last year is leaving UIC. During her time at UIC, Maggie was instrumental in revitalizing the ethics consultation service in the University hospital. She also shepherded important changes in policy regarding patient care. We all appreciate Maggie’s practiced clinical experience and hope that she does truly find greener pastures when she becomes Vice President for Ethics of a health care organization in Arizona.

We are pleased to announce that as of October Nanette Elster has joined the humanities program as an assistant professor. Nanette holds a law degree from Loyola University and has worked as a staff attorney for the circuit court of Cook County. At Boston University she also received a master’s degree in public health. Nanette specializes in ethical and legal issues of cloning, genetic privacy, embryo research, assisted reproductive technologies. She has co-authored a number of articles with Lori B. Andrews and has contributed to a number of reports submitted to national advisory commissions. We look forward to integrating Nanette’s legal background and ethics interest into a variety of teaching and research programs at the academic medical center.

DME Bulletin: Vol. 4, No.3

Office of the Head

The Department of Medical Education, in conjunction with the Special Interest Group on Evidence-Based Health Care Education (EHCE), will sponsor a full day symposium on April 29th, titled “Evidence-Based Health Care Education: Can It Make a Difference?” The symposium will explore current progress and future promise in applying the principles and methods of evidence-based medicine (EBM) to health care education. Issue-focused work groups will develop agendas for structuring and pressing forward the work to be done in EBM translation, teaching, outcomes research and impact evaluation of EBM and EHCE.
The Department of Medical Education, College of Medicine, and the College of Business of the University of Illinois at Chicago have initiated a collaboration with Advocate Health Care to provide continuing medical education to Advocate’s medical administrative leadership. Faculty of the Department will develop and present instructional sessions addressing issues in health management, health financing, and quality and cost management.

Curriculum

Three positions have been filled in the Curriculum program area. Jennifer Cassaro has assumed the Longitudinal Primary Care Program Coordinator position; Marcia Edison is the program area’s new postdoctoral fellow; and Jennifer Bratt is the new program administrator for the Scholars for Teaching Excellence Program. In early November, Marcia Edison presented a paper to the Association for the Study of Higher Education meeting in Albuquerque, NM.
Annette Yonke completed the project at the Rockford campus funded by HRSA to establish a Division of Behavioral Science in the Dept. of Family and Community Medicine. The project developed an infrastructure, an Essentials of Patient Care course and a faculty development program to integrate behavioral sciences into the second- and third-year medical school curriculum. She is also teaching a seminar titled Becoming a Health Professional in the Honors College for students considering a career in the health professions.

Mark Gelula has been named Editor for INTERCOM, the quarterly publication of the Society of Medical College Directors of CME. Mark was a featured presenter at the Faculty Development Seminar sponsored by the downstate chapter of the American College of Physicians in February in Peoria, IL. His faculty development session was titled “Giving Feedback: How, When and Why” and featured two standardized medical students who were used for teaching purposes during the session. Mark was also featured as a plenary presenter and as a workshop facilitator at the Annual Association of Academic Psychiatrists meeting in San Diego in March. His topic was “Are Residents and Medical Students Adult Learners?”, and his workshop focused on “Creating Clinical Teaching Activities.” Mark continues his relationship with the teaching faculty in the Department of Radiation Oncology at Princess Margaret Hospital, Toronto, Ontario, Canada. Most recently he facilitated a strategic planning process for educational research with the group.
Recent grant submissions include Annette Yonke’s project with U.I.C.O.M. Rockford faculty to teach clinical practice guidelines to fourth-year medical students, submitted to the Agency for Health Care Policy and Research, and Marcia Edison’s proposal to F.I.P.S.E. to evaluate group learning in the new Essentials of Clinical Medicine curriculum.
The Longitudinal Primary Care Program recruited over sixty new faculty preceptors for the academic year 1997-1998 as part of an ongoing effort to develop and maintain excellence in the preceptor pool. In late October, Joyce Smith offered a “Teaching Medical Interviewing in Primary Care” seminar for preceptors. The demand for the seminar was so great that a second session is being considered. The LPC program also staged two half-day workshops in October, January, and March. Over a score of LPC preceptors earned CME credit for participating in the “Time Management and the LPC–Effective Teaching in a Busy Practice” and “Providing Effective Feedback and Supervision to Medical Students” faculty development workshops.

Educational Programs

The MHPE program currently has its greatest enrollment, with 56 students. These students represent 9 health professions and 10 countries.
Congratulations to MHPE student, Dan Poenaru, for the publication of another article on educational matters. (Poenaru D, Morales D, Richards A, O’Connor M. Running an objective structured clinical examination on a shoestring budget. Am J Surg 173:538-541, 1997.)
Georges Bordage was honored as the Jack L. Maatsch Visiting Scholar in Medical Education at Michigan State University in February. He spoke on “Clinical Reasoning and Knowledge Organization: Implications for Learning and Assessment.” This program was created in memory of the contributions of Dr. Maatsch to medical education, particularly in the areas of the assessment and certification of physician competence. Previous Maatsch Visiting Scholars were Lee Shulman, Ph.D, Stanford University and the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, and David Swanson, PhD, National Board of Medical Examiners.

International Programs

Dr. Francisco Tancredi, Program Director for Latin America and the Caribbean for the W.K. Kellogg Foundation visited the DME in November and presented a seminar on “New Initiatives for Medical Education in Latin American.” He reported on several projects currently being funded by the Foundation, all of which feature the collaboration, from the outset of the project, of representatives from educational institutions, health care practices, and the community.
Ara Tekian conducted workshops in Thailand and Korea during the month of December. In Korea, he addressed the First Symposium in Commemoration of the Establishment of the Department of Medical Education at Yonsei University in Seoul, speaking on “Practical Evaluation of Teaching and Teachers in Medical Schools. He then conducted a two-day workshop on Problem-based Learning at that University. Dr. Tekian conducted workshops at three universities in Thailand, including two-day workshops on Assessment of Clinical Competence and Performance at Prince of Songkla University in Hat-Yai and Rangsit University in Bangkok plus a one-day workshop on feedback in clinical teaching for Srinakharinwirot University and Bangkok Metropolitan Medical College in Bangkok.

Medical Humanities

Timothy F. Murphy has helped a group of first-year medical students organize a Brown Bag Bioethics Forum. At these extracurricular sessions, students have discussions with ethicists from around Chicago on such topics as selling organs for transplantation, the conduct of offshore experimental research with HIV-infected pregnant women, and the use of animal tissues in human transplantation. Dr. Murphy has also organized a monthly brown bag ethics program in the University Hospital, which has so far looked at privacy in AIDS diagnoses and disagreements about appropriate care at the end of life.
During National Breast Cancer Awareness month, Barbara Sharf was a guest lecturer at the Ohio University College of Osteopathic Medicine. In November, she gave a talk, “Medicine as Ideology in Cuba,” at the National Communication Association, just prior to leading another UIC health care delegation back to Havana in early December.
At the Visions for Ethics and Humanities conference in Baltimore in November, Suzanne Poirier participated in the mentoring program for young scholars in the medical humanities.

Clinical Decision Making and Medical Informatics

Arthur Elstein and Gretchen Chapman are writing a chapter on the psychology of medical decision making for a book on medical decision making, edited by Dr. Chapman and Frank Sonnenberg, to be published in 1998 or 1999 by Cambridge University Press.

DME Bulletin: Vol.4, No.2

Office of the Head

The annual departmental meeting hosted Dr Lawrence G. Smith as its guest speaker. Dr. Smith is the Head of the Division of Medical Education in the Department of Medicine at Mount Sinai Medical Center of New York. He spoke on “Local Implementation of Evidence-Based Health Care.”

Curriculum

Mark Gelula’s three-year proposed study, “Improving Clinical Teaching Skills through Standardized Medical Students,” was fully funded recently with a F.I.P.S.E. grant for more than $127,000. Also fully funded was the five-year study, “Illinois Cooperative Curriculum in Sleep Disorders,” proposed by the College of Medicine’s Center for Sleep Disorders, on which Richard Foley and Bonnie Roe collaborated. They will continue their collaboration over the course of the study, focusing on the curricular and evaluation components of the grant.

Educational Programs

The MHPE program had one graduate in the fall semester, Jerry Glenn, MD, PhD. In his thesis, “Development of a Test for Rapid Screening of College-Age Students for Learning Disabilities,” he analyzed the discriminant function of a self-report questionnaire in distinguishing between students with and without learning disabilities and the questionnaire’s utility as a screening tool for identifying students who could benefit from comprehensive testing for learning disabilities.

International Programs

The DME hosted two short-term fellows, each for two months. Dr. Somchai Suntornlohanakul is a pediatrician and the Assistant Dean for Educational Resources Development at Prince of Songkla University. His research was focused in the areas of clinical competency assessment and the use of standardized patients. Dr. Celia Maria Kira is an internist and member of the Center of Development of Medical Education at the University of Sao Paulo Faculty of Medicine in Brazil. Her research was focused on the assessment of basic clinical skills.

Medical Humanities

Timothy F. Murphy has helped a group of first-year medical students organize a Brown Bag Bioethics Forum.

During National Breast Cancer Awareness month, Barbara Sharf was a guest lecturer at the Ohio University College of Osteopathic Medicine. In November, she gave a talk, “Medicine as Ideology in Cuba,” at the National Communication Association, just prior to leading another UIC health care delegation back to Havana in early December.

In November, Suzanne Poirier spoke in the University of Texas Medical Branch (UTMB) course “Narrative and Medicine,” discussing the multiple voices of the medical record. She also lectured for the UTMB Chauncey Leake History of Medicine Society on the topic “Making Sex Safe in 1939: The Syphilis Control Program and the Clap Doctor of Chicago.”

Clinical Decision Making and Medical Informatics

Arthur Elstein was honored by the Society for Medical Decision Making. He was chosen to receive the Society’s Award for Career Achievement. The award was presented at the Society’s annual meeting, held in Houston, Texas. Previous recipients have been Stephen G. Pauker, MD, Tufts New England Medical Center and Milton C. Weinstein, PhD, Harvard School of Public Health.

Alan Schwartz presented a paper, “Expected Feelings about Risky Options,” at the 1997 meeting of the Society for Judgment and Decision Making in Philadelphia in November and at the Center for Decision Research at the University of Chicago.