Dean of Medicine updates community on implementation of action plan
By McGill Reporter staff
Dean of Medicine and Vice-Principal of Health Affairs David Eidelman has announced organizational changes as part of the action plan to address accreditation issues identified in a recent review of the Faculty’s Undergraduate Medical Education (UGME) program.
Eidelman shared the changes with the Faculty of Medicine community in the first of what will be a series of updates on the work being conducted to correct the deficiencies identified by the U.S. Liaison Committee for Medical Education (LCME) and the Committee on the Accreditation of Canadian Medical Schools (CACMS), who conducted the review. The UGME program remains fully accredited, but with probation. It is one of several programs offered by the Faculty of Medicine.
Creation of new Vice-Dean, Education position
The organizational changes the Faculty of Medicine will implement include the recruitment of a Vice-Dean, Education, to “support our educational mission in the same way as we do our research mission,” Eidelman said. The Vice-Dean will have oversight of the educational programs in all of the Faculty’s schools. The first task of the Vice-Dean will be to review the structure and organization of the UGME program.
The Faculty will also add a staff member to the current Accreditation Office, which is responsible for all professional program accreditations in the Faculty of Medicine. “This will help ensure that the processes, systems and policies required to meet our standards are well established and effective, and that meaningful data can be generated as needed,” the Dean explained.
And as part of the Faculty’s ongoing efforts to improve administrative services across all departments, the Medical Education Services, which include the Undergraduate Medical Education operations, have been reorganized.
Eidelman indicated the administrative changes will help “meet the needs of students, while also responding to the accreditation demands.”
Update on implementation of Preliminary Action Plan
To ensure rapid resolution of the accreditation issues, an Accreditation Implementation Committee, chaired by Dean Eidelman, has been put in place. This Committee, the mandate and composition of which can be found here, meets every two weeks.
Preliminary steps implemented to date include:
- The timetable for achieving the Faculty’s strategic milestones, with outcome markers, has been updated and should now be compliant with the accreditation standard.
- To ensure comparability of education and assessment between teaching sites, students in the Transition to Clinical Practice and Clerkship components of the UGME program will begin using myMED Portfolio to log information about their clinical encounters and clinical experiences in real-time. This new and valuable application will better help the Faculty identify and then address inconsistencies between sites.
- The first of many steps to optimize the functioning of the Curriculum Committee has been taken. With the completion of its mandate, the New Curriculum Implementation Executive Committee has now been dissolved. As of July, all curricular decision-making and responsibility resides with the Curriculum Committee. Membership has been streamlined and the terms of reference have been revised to reaffirm its role and responsibility toward UGME.
- To better connect with the clinical site directors and teaching faculty at its Gatineau site, the Faculty of Medicine has committed to holding an annual retreat for clerkship directors and clinical chairs in Gatineau, the first of which has already been scheduled.
- The Faculty’s contracts of affiliation with major teaching hospitals have been updated to include a memorandum of understanding on the learning environment and accidental exposure protocols. These contracts have all been approved by the Boards of the partner institutions.
The Faculty of Medicine will consult regularly with the CACMS Secretariat over the coming months, beginning September 16 and 17, 2015, when they will visit the Faculty to confirm that the action plan is progressing according to expectations and will be ready for submission by the December deadline.
“The CACMS Secretariat was impressed that we had already developed an extensive action plan and that we published it online the same week we received our accreditation outcome,” the Dean said. “We look forward to meeting with them in September for formal feedback and approval of the actions specified in the plan.
“We are committed to excellence more than ever and fully engaged in addressing the accreditation results swiftly and thoroughly.”
Eidelman reiterated that the accreditation issues outlined in the review and work plan apply exclusively to the UGME program, and not to the Faculty’s other programs.
To read Dean David Eidelman’s message, click here.
To access the 2015 Accreditation Action Plan Framework, click here.