The thirty-third class of the MSU Primary Care Faculty Development Fellowship Program will present the results of their research and curriculum development major projects on Wednesday, May 16 and Thursday, May 17, 2012.  The fellows have been working on their projects during the past year.  They have designed, developed, implemented and evaluated their major project.  

Class of 2012 Fellows

Topics at this year's poster and conference sessions will include:

• Bedside Ultrasound Curriculum
• Continuity in Ambulatory Care
• Teaching Practice Management
• Sepsis Screening
• Chronic Care Model Curriculum
• Teaching Quality Improvement
• Addressing Parental Vaccine Concerns
• Do home monitors work for diabetic patients?
• A Resident Breastfeeding Curriculum
• Teaching Cognitive Reasoning via Simulation
• Teaching Professionalism
• Get the Lead Out: An In-Office Strategy
• Teaching Transitional Care to Adult Care Providers
• Core Didactic Curriculum in Family Medicine
• A System-Based Practice Curriculum for Pediatric Residents
• Does the METRIC Program Improve Hypertension Care
• Teaching Residents to Screen for Low Literacy
• A Curriculum in Maternity and Newborn Care

Each fellow will present their work at a poster session on Wednesday, May 16, 2012 from 4:00 to 6:00 p.m. in the Radiology Building Atrium at Michigan State University.  They will also orally present their projects on Thursday, May 17, 2012 at the Kellogg Center at Michigan State University. 

B-CLR

One of the key features of the CHM mission has been to graduate physicians to meet the health care needs of Michigan. Historically, we have measured our success in this area in terms of the number of students selecting primary care specialties and the number of students who choose to practice in rural or urban underserved areas. CHM ranks above the 90th percentile nationally among US medical schools for proportion of graduates practicing in primary care specialties. CHM also ranks above the 80th percentile in the proportion of graduates practicing in rural areas and above the 90th percentile for National Health Service Corps (4%) participation.  Nationally, 37% of our graduates practice in locations designated as health professions shortage areas (HPSA).

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In more recent years, there has been increasing concern nationally about the debt load of medical students at graduation and the impact of this debt on the career choice of our graduates. The CHM Graduate Follow-up Study annually surveys our graduates two years post-graduation, and among the many issues addressed in the survey are questions related to debt load and the impact of this debt on career choice.

This figure shows the self-reported debt of CHM graduates two years after leaving medical school. The mean medical education debt for the 2009 graduates exceeded $190,000; this is almost double the education-related debt of graduates ten years earlier.  For the 2009 graduates, almost half (47%) indicated that debt had no impact on their specialty choice; a smaller proportion of graduates reported that debt had a minor impact (28%) on their specialty choice, while 25% reported that debt had a moderate or major impact on their career choice. Not surprisingly, the mean medical school debt reported by each of these groups varied significantly, as show in the table below.

Aside from the increased burden related to debt, there is evidence of increasing impact of debt on specialty choice. The figure below shows the historical trends in CHM graduates' report of the impact of debt on career choice. Among 2009 graduates, 47% reported that their education-related debt had no impact on their career choice, compared to almost 80% of the graduates of 1998 who reported no impact of debt on their career choice.

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The issues related to career choice are complex and debt is only one factor that plays a role in this decision. A recent study by the Robert Graham Center provides insight to the complexity of the question of career choice. Click here for a link to this report, What Influences Medical Student and Resident Choices? Nonetheless there is a general concern that education-related debt is becoming a more important in this decision, suggesting the need to consider various approaches help ameliorate the impact of debt. In this respect, CHM has been exploring enhanced student support such as scholarships, cost controls, and various loan repayment options to enhance students' flexibility to consider more career options. 

In January 2012 the College conducted a faculty development needs assessment, a joint effort of OMERAD, Faculty Affairs and Development, and College-Wide Assessment. It had been many years since such a large-scale assessment was done, and times have changed so much that we felt we needed to find out what faculty felt they needed now. 

We emailed the online survey to faculty at all campuses and received a little over 400 responses. The survey asked faculty about their interest in skill development in the following areas:

• Curriculum Development
• Teaching
• Technology Skills
• Evaluation
• Educational Research and Scholarship
• Career Development
• Learning Format
• Special Learning Opportunities 

For the respondent group as a whole, the most popular topics were:

• Curriculum     
• Selecting instructional strategies to enhance learning
• Implementing curricula
• Teaching
• Teaching in small group settings
• Motivating learners
• Assessment and Evaluation
• Providing constructive feedback to learners
• Assessing clinical performance, and
• Evaluating outcomes in relation to an educational experience.

While topics such as providing constructive feedback to learners and assessing learners' clinical performance were endorsed by respondents across many communities, the interest in some topics was more focused by community. The table below highlights the topics that received endorsement by 50% or more of the respondents in each community.

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The questionnaire also asked about preferred learning formats and the timing of program offerings. Live face-to-face workshops was the most popular learning format (63%), however self-paced web-based tutorials were endorsed by many respondents (53%). Distance-learning (41%), webinars (41%) and on-line lectures (39%) such as Camtasia were less frequently endorsed.

 

When asked about times of the day and days of the week, there was tremendous uniformity in that about 20% to 30% of respondents were available at any time specific time block on any specified day; there was no convergence apparent as far as scheduling. Thursdays from 4:00 to 6:00 pm was the block with the most respondents available (34%). This information highlights the challenges of scheduling live faculty development presentations.

 

The survey results are instructive and in the months ahead, various units of the College will be using these needs assessment findings to plan for future faculty development programs and delivery formats.