Saturday, December 13
The dean of the School of Medicine and Health Sciences outlined a plan to bring his school back into good standing with its accrediting body during a Faculty Senate meeting on Friday afternoon.
The Liaison Committee on Medical Education, a medical school accreditor, placed the school on probation in mid-October – making it the fifth school since 1994 to receive the status. For about two months, SMHS administrators, through a spokeswoman, declined to be interviewed about the probation or efforts to reverse the decision.
“I take this seriously,” Dean James Scott said on Friday. “I take all responsibility for this because I was the dean in the preparation for this and the dean through this.”
Scott said school officials have been working on a report to give to the LCME in January as part of a plan to reverse the probation as quickly as possible. They have refused to release the initial report from the LCME.
“Since October, we have put together a steering committee that meets on a daily basis to go over the progress we are making,” Scott said. “President Knapp has also put together an oversight committee. We meet every week to go over the progress.”
The school will know when the LCME plans to visit again after the first week of February, Scott said.
The dean expounded on three reasons cited for the probation – curriculum management, lounge and study space issues and administrative problems. He said some of the problems, like faculty appointments at affiliate sites scattered throughout the Washington area, are easier to remedy.
“On the day (the LCME) came, Feb. 13, they identified a handful of physicians in the department of medicine at Fairfax Hospital who didn’t have current faculty appointments on that day,” Scott said. He noted that the number of staff members identified was less than 10, and the situation has been amended.
A more difficult issue to tackle is curriculum management, Scott said. Five of the seven issues identified by the LCME fell under this category.
“One had to do with the phrasing of our institutional objectives; they needed to be more in ‘outcome-based’ terms. Most of our objectives were in those terms but they were not 100 percent in those terms,” Scott said. “Because of that, there was an additional finding that since they weren’t in those terms, then we couldn’t put we were using them universally to measure the effectiveness of the curriculum.”
He added that the LCME found no problem with the curriculum itself.
“They were exceedingly complimentary of the outcomes of our students in every national examination, every test, every residency program,” Scott said.
The LCME report also requires the medical school to employ a computerized system to receive continuous feedback about the curriculum. Scott acknowledged the medical school “doesn’t have a completely comprehensive process” to identify any possible holes in the curriculum.
This year’s probation is not the first time the medical school has had to remedy citations quickly. In a 2001 visit, the LCME cited a “decrepit” hospital, a shrinking clinical faculty and patient population and a lack of lounge space. With the new GW Hospital completed in 2002, many of the LCME citations were rectified. But Scott said that although 1,000 square feet of floor space was added to Ross Hall since 2001, the LCME continues to cite the lack of lounge space as an issue.
“A significant minority of students still said there was inadequate lounge space,” Scott said. He added that the citation was based on student perception, as evidenced by student surveys LCME collected.
Scott said he has hired several consultants from both external sources and GW’s Graduate School of Education and Human Development. SHMS has also sought advice from LCME representatives and other organizations including the American Medical Association.
In closing his report, Scott told the Faculty Senate that he was eager to improve the issues listed by the LCME.
He said, “What they have pointed to are things that have the potential to make us a better school.”
