Dear Students and Colleagues,
It is hard to believe it has been three months since I started here. It has been exciting for me to learn more about NEOMED and meet so many of you at the open forums, student impact council, faculty committee meetings, and at our affiliated hospitals.
I have met with leadership here on campus and at our affiliated sites and I have been overwhelmingly impressed with their enthusiasm, dedication, and commitment to NEOMED and our community. I am also truly in awe of the passion our students bring to the shared enterprise of improving the medical school curriculum. We've embarked on a number of initiatives designed to unify faculty, staff, and students behind this shared goal.
These initiatives include:
Joint faculty-student leadership in addressing curricular issues: We have not only turned the leadership of the curriculum committees back to the faculty but, more importantly, encouraged the curriculum committee to establish joint faculty/student/administration task forces to reexamine such issues as the use of PI, the attendance policy, and the way we use Canvas to organize courses.
Engaging students for further feedback: Through town halls, open forums and encouraging student representation on committees, we continue to seek student feedback through multiple avenues. My own door is always open to students, and my email is always on. I've asked the student impact council to do an annual mid-year student survey starting this January so we can quantitatively track student satisfaction with our performance and solicit suggestions for continued improvement.
I believe that it is also important to strengthen our support for students within and outside the curriculum.
Preclinical Years:
- We are implementing an optional asynchronous online pre-matriculation program this spring so that next year's incoming M1s can be better prepared for the rigors of the curriculum.
- We've worked with the provost to fund additional counselors for the Learning Center.
- We have implemented processes and expectations around giving students feedback after examinations.
- We have engaged an outside consultant to review our learning objectives and examinations for quality and USMLE alignment.
- We have started a bimonthly USMLE prep session for M1 students that transitions to a weekly session in the M2 year.
- We will offer an optional USMLE prep course (without additional tuition charges) after the M2 year before USMLE Step 1.
- We have created faculty development programs to better orient the clinical faculty who teach preclinical students to their roles in our integrated curriculum.
Clinical years:
- We have asked our clinical chairs to engage with the clerkship directors to review clerkship curricula.
- In the months to come, we will be reviewing the USMLE Step 2 prep elective to add to its value. (Student feedback in this regard would be welcome!)
- We are initiating processes to ensure that our students receive meaningful mid-clerkship feedback, are observed doing relevant portions of histories and physical exams on each rotation, and have their grades posted in a timely manner.
Academic and Career Advising: We will be restructuring our system for academic and career advising, beginning with hiring more counselors to assist Dr. Corrie Stofcho and Harmony Stanger, who are seriously overextended. More to come on this in the next few months.
Finally, I would be remiss if I didn't mention our work on maintaining our accreditation through the Liaison Committee on Medical Accreditation (LCME). We are currently fully accredited, but the LCME has asked for an update by April 1, 2024, on our curricular mapping efforts (now completed), student satisfaction with the responsiveness of the Dean's office, curriculum committee to student feedback, and student satisfaction with the integration of the curriculum.
As you gathered from the above, we're working on these issues and hope to be able to show progress by our mid-year survey in January. We expect the LCME to make their regularly scheduled full visit in the 2026-2027 academic year, and while that may seem a long time from now, it's not too soon to start preparing.
We're conducting a full review of NEOMED COM performance on all LCME standards and elements. As many of you know, we expanded our class size this year by admitting ten additional students, with plans to admit 190 students in 2024 and 200 in 2025. When we sought permission from the LCME for this expansion, we were required to have a consultation with the LCME secretariat. That went well, and they seemed pleased with the plans outlined above. In addition, we now have commitments in place from University Hospitals in Cleveland to accept an additional 24 M3 students within the next two years, and we are actively seeking to expand our M3/M4 capacity at other sites as well. I'm confident we'll provide a high-quality educational environment for the expanded class.
We all need to work together to continue to improve our school. I believe in open, two-way communication. My door is always open, and my email is always on. In addition, recognizing that different folks have different communication styles, we will continue to push out news and seek your feedback in a variety of ways. These will include but are not limited to the following:
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Quarterly Dialogue with the Dean meetings for faculty and staff
- Quarterly email news like this for those who like to read
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A Monthly "You Asked, We Listened" newsletter to our students that summarizes the feedback we have received and how we acted on it. This will also hyperlink to summaries of our monthly student town hall meetings for each class.
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We will continue to utilize the Pulse and social media to share news of the College (@neomedcom on Instagram and COM Facebook page)
I am excited about the future here at NEOMED and incredibly grateful to be able to share it with all of you.
