Due to the chair's schedule for April, there were no Curriculum Committee meetings held in April.
Announcements:
Dr. Rooks announced that the membership of this committee is on a three-year cycle and that we are adding new members. Letters will go out in July to explain this in further detail.
This meeting is to begin a decision process that will determine distribution of time for refereed courses in the 3rd and 4th year. The following tables summarize the results of the survey of Curriculum Committee members regarding time allotments for required 3rd and 4th year courses.
| Medicine | 8 weeks |
| Pediatrics | 8 weeks |
| OB/GYN | 6 weeks |
| Surgery | 8 weeks |
| Psychiatry | 6 weeks |
| Family Medicine | 8 weeks |
| Anesthesia | 2 weeks |
| Neurology | 2 weeks |
| Emergency Medicine | 2 weeks |
| Rehab. | 2 weeks |
| Geriatrics | 2 weeks |
| Total | 54 weeks |
| none | |
| 3rd and 4th Year Total: Summary | |
| Medicine | 12 weeks |
| Pediatrics | 8 weeks |
| Family Medicine | 8 weeks |
| Surgery | 8 weeks |
| Psychiatry | 6 weeks |
| OB/GYN | 6 weeks |
| Neurology | 2 weeks |
| Anesthesia | 2 weeks |
| Emergency Medicine | 2 weeks |
| Geriatrics | 2 weeks |
| Rehab. | 1 week |
These things needed to be included in the curriculum:
Dr. Barrett's gave an overview of his letter to Dr. Watson in reviewing the Pediatric component of the IGC:
... we have established an Office of Pediatric Education within the Pediatric Department headed by Jim Sherman, our vice Chair for Pediatric Education. The office is responsible for overall oversight and programmatic integration of the Pediatric clerkship, senior sub-internship rotations, the Pediatric residency, and office fellowship programs. Jim is assisted in this by Maureen Kays and Don Eitzman for the clerkship, by Amy Cooper and Jennifer Lassiter for the residency program, and by a Fellowship Advisory Committee consisting of the eight subspecialty Fellowship Training Program Directors.
A major goal for the coming year for the Office of Pediatric Education is to significantly improve the value of the Pediatric clerkship and the Pediatric component of the IGC.
In terms of the IGC, we remain committed to the goals of improving community based generalist training to enhancing the depth and diversity of cases for which the student has primary exposure, and to the expansion of additional community-based primary care education sites. To this end we are currently finalizing a plan for utilizing the two-practitioner Haile Plantation site as an interdisciplinary generalist clerkship teaching site, adding a new pediatrics practice at the Eastside clinic (which we anticipate will open in July) considering the rotation of students with the community-based primary care practitioners in our Peds After Hours program, exploring the opportunities in Starke with Shands HealthCare, Interlachen Pediatrics {Dr. Haafez), and with our colleagues at the Health Department and community health centers in Jacksonville. Dr. Kays is responsible for finalizing this new plan for the IGC component devoted to Pediatrics.
In order to optimally engage the Pediatric faculty in the interdisciplinary generalist curriculum, and to provide the student with an experience which better integrates the categorical Pediatric clerkship curriculum with the Pediatric IGC components, I am proposing that the Pediatric component of the IGC be moved within the student's curriculum so that it is, as much as possible, contiguous with the categorical clerkship in Pediatrics. The oversight and overall responsibilities for the IGC could remain as they are. In this way, the students' perception that the categorical clerkship in Pediatrics is too short (data I provided to you) and the perception of the pediatric faculty that the IGC "belongs to someone else" would be much improved by this proposal. Most importantly, we would create continuity for the students in their goal of understanding the principles of child health ambulatory generalist pediatrics, acute pediatric medicine, and newborn medicine.
I understand that you will be presenting some of these ideas at the IGC Advisory Committee. Please let me know if you would like Jim Sherman, Maureen Kays, or me to attend any of those meetings to further explore the possibilities.
Thanks Bob, for meeting with Jim and me. We remain committed to achieving the IGC goals. We hope to be able to better do this by further integrating the Pediatric component of the IGC with the other teaching efforts of the Department of Pediatrics and our community-based primary care practitioner colleagues.
A solid foundation in the principles of child health and human development is essential to our goal of training generalist physicians. Pediatric generalists will continue to be a principal provider of primary care to children in this country. Much of the core of pediatric education should be provided in the ambulatory arena. Teaching of ambulatory pediatric primary care is, therefore, central to our departmental educational goals and is the focus of our general pediatric division.
Over the past year student comments regarding their overall pediatric experience in lGC have improved somewhat. However, student evaluations and faculty assessments of the pediatric component of the IGC experience continue to show a limitation in the number of quality primary care education sites, lack of continuity in some of the current sites for the individual student, repetition of didactic experiences from the pediatric clerkship, and discontinuity as students move from a pediatric site to an adult site within the same day during the IGC.
In order to improve the IGC experience for all students, we propose to integrate the two weeks currently part of IGC into the current pediatric rotation. The goals of the IGC would continue to be emphasized: ambulatory generalist experience and focus on common problems in a community-based setting. We would provide improved patient continuity for students during their pediatric experiences. We would improve the students' education by meshing IGC lectures with the current core educational sessions during the clerkship. Our department is committed to developing more ambulatory educational experiences for students in pediatrics. We are committed to expanding the ambulatory opportunities using the following new teaching sites each staffed by a full-time pediatric generalist:
We are also exploring the feasibility of having the students spend three evenings (or a weekend shift at PAH) of the ambulatory care component of the rotation in Pediatric After Hours seeing the primary care patient population with general pediatric faculty, community pediatricians, and pediatric senior residents.
Include pediatric subspecialty experience in the ambulatory arena to complement the inpatient experience (e.g. if a student is on Orange for two weeks (Cardiology, Pulmonary, Neuro, Endo) - their ambulatory experience would include time in other clinics - e.g. Renal) - these subspecialities would be chosen as fields that see patients common to generalists (e.g., obesity, hypertension, asthma, poor growth, short stature). The goal is to provide a comprehensive pediatric ambulatory experience with the ambulatory component continuing to gain a greater predominance in the student's experience.
Dr. Ledbetter made a statement that the feedback from students in the format we get now is not very useful. The end of the 3rd year (this summer) should reflect on what they've done in the third year and give a summation of their year.
Group Discussions:
The following is a list of the committee's summation of key issues that were discussed:
Dr. Rooks announced that at the next meeting Dr. Harman will be presenting Internship 101 or transition at end of the course at the next meeting.
Please read the handout of "The University of Florida College of Medicine Educational Program Renewal Plan - A Summary," which is located on the Curriculum Committee web site at http://www/med.ufl.edu/oea/cc/.
The next meeting of the Curriculum Committee will be May 25, 7:30, M112.