image: This is Catherine Lucey, M.D. view more
Credit: UCSF
The American Medical Association announced on June 14 that the UCSF School of Medicine is one of 11 medical schools nationwide that will receive $1 million over five years to develop and implement innovative curricula to train healthcare professionals in the best medical practices.
The 11 grants were selected from among 119 proposals submitted, representing more than 80 percent of eligible medical schools nationwide.
The $1 million will be issued through the AMA’s Accelerating Change in Medical Education initiative.
“We are excited that the AMA has recognized the importance of UCSF's vision for a curriculum designed to prepare graduates who are expert in providing patient-centered care, as well as in working collaboratively within inter-professional systems to continuously improve the quality, safety and equity of health care for all,” said Catherine Lucey, MD, vice dean for education at the UCSF School of Medicine.
UCSF’s proposal, “Bridges to High Quality Health Care Curriculum,” seeks to create the “collaboratively expert physician,” one who embraces the responsibility to work within inter-professional teams to continually improve the safety, quality and value of health care.
Lucey and Mark Laret, CEO of the UCSF Medical Center, are leading the UCSF curriculum development.
The UCSF medical school curriculum will be explicitly designed so that students will actively contribute to the continual improvement of health care systems, as they learn the competencies needed to provide care for patients and patient populations, Lucey said.
“We are committed to designing this curriculum so that our students, from the time they begin medical school, are prepared to add value to the clinical sites in which they are learning,” Lucey said.
Entering students will be embedded in clinical environments in which they will advance initiatives that aim to improve care and outcomes. Long-term assignments will ensure that students have sufficient time to build relationships with diverse professionals and patients. Students will be evaluated for core competencies using assessment systems that will enable trainees to complete these requirements more quickly.
“We are grateful for the support of our partner healthcare systems, who already provide clinical education for our students and who have enthusiastically endorsed this new vision. We are working closely with UCSF Medical Center, San Francisco General Hospital and Trauma Center, the San Francisco Veterans Affairs Medical Center, and Kaiser Permanente’s Oakland Medical Center,” Lucey said.
The UCSF curriculum redesign, which began in May 2012, is currently in the planning phase and will be fully implemented by 2016 for all medical students. There have been several pilot projects, including one in which students were taught process mapping and assigned to find ways to improve access in an endocrinology clinic.
A critical component of the AMA’s initiative will be to establish a learning consortium with the selected schools, to rapidly disseminate best practices to other medical and health-professional schools.
In announcing the awards, AMA President Jeremy A. Lazarus, MD, said, “We are thrilled to award funding to 11 medical schools for their bold, transformative proposals designed to close the gaps between how medical students are trained and how health care is delivered. This AMA initiative will identify specific changes in medical education that can be applied in medical schools throughout the nation to enable students to thrive in a changing healthcare environment and to improve the health of our nation’s patients.”
Schools that competed for the awards submitted letters of intent outlining their proposals in February. During March, 28 individual schools and three collaborative groups of schools were selected to submit full proposals. A national advisory panel worked with the AMA to select the final 11 schools.
UCSF is a leading university dedicated to promoting health worldwide through advanced biomedical research, graduate-level education in the life sciences and health professions, and excellence in patient care.
Related Links:
School of Medicine Revamps Curriculum to Reflect Changing Health Practice
UCSF Building Bridges
AMA: Accelerating Change in Medical Education
Follow UCSF
UCSF.edu | Facebook.com/ucsf | Twitter.com/ucsf | YouTube.com/ucsf