Family medicine
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Among the oldest in the nation, the University of Utah Physician Assistant Program (UPAP) serves the state of Utah and surrounding areas and is a division of the Department of Family and Preventive Medicine. Recognizing the need to produce health care providers from diverse racial and ethnic backgrounds, UPAP instituted structural changes to improve student compositional diversity. This paper is a presentation and evaluation of the changes made to determine their relationship with compositional diversity, ultimate practice setting, and national rankings. ⋯ The UPAP experience demonstrates that intentional diversity efforts are associated with improvement in racial/ethnic diversity and national rankings. Other medical school graduate programs, specifically the medical doctor (MD), public health, and basic science programs can use this model to improve their compositional diversity.
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Active learning, defined as a variety of teaching methods that engage the learner in self-evaluation and personalized learning, is emerging as the new educational standard. This study aimed to evaluate how family medicine clerkship directors are incorporating active learning methods into the clerkship curriculum. ⋯ The use of active learning in the family medicine clerkship is required both by educational standards and student expectations. Clerkship directors may feel challenged by lack of resources in their attempts to adopt active learning. However, there are many methods of active learning, such as online modules, that are less faculty time intensive.
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Family medicine residency program directors (PD) oversee the training of every new family physician in the United States. The median tenure of family medicine PDs is 4.5 years, and factors relating to length of tenure and reasons for departure are not well known. This exploratory study examined why family medicine PDs leave their position. ⋯ Family medicine PDs left the position due to multiple factors primarily related to career pathway choices and not solely due to demands of the job. Additional research with PDs of very short tenures and long tenures may yield further details about sustaining PDs in residency education to successfully train the next generation of family physicians.
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Leading medical organizations including the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education (ACGME) and American Association of Medical Colleges (AAMC) espouse the value of a diverse physician workforce, including disability, yet there is a dearth of research about this population in graduate medical education (GME). More information is needed on the prevalence of disability in the resident population, plans to recruit residents with disabilities, and program perceptions of barriers to inclusion. The goal of this study was to better understand the prevalence of disability in the resident population, plans to recruit residents with disabilities, and program perceptions of barriers to disability inclusion and frequency of disability-related complaints and litigation. ⋯ Employing faculty with disabilities may be the driving force for having an active plan to recruit residents with disabilities. In order to meet the stated diversity goals of medicine, programs will need to increase professional development around disability inclusion.
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The Collaborative Scholarship Intensive: A Research-Intensive Course to Improve Faculty Scholarship.
Learning to balance the clinical, educational, and scholarly elements of an academic career is challenging for faculty. To increase research output amongst family medicine faculty with limited to no publications, we developed the Collaborative Scholarship Intensive (CSI) to provide participants with intensive instruction in research methodology coupled with structured writing support and protected time for writing. ⋯ Our CSI faculty development program successfully engaged clinical faculty in a collaborative research program. Our results suggest that a program focused on intensive instruction in research methodology coupled with structured writing support and protected writing time may be a model for faculty development in other academic departments.