Minutes from the Curriculum Committee Meeting
3/22/10
Topic
Attending:
Minutes
Information Items
Consent Agenda
Curriculum Objectives
Discussion
Byerley, Bynum, Cross, Dreesen, Farrell, Gilliland,
Newton, Perry , Rao, Shaheen , Slatt, Steiner, Stone
 Minutes reviewed with no corrections.
 Taken off consent – what is meant by review of the
Advisory College?
o This is the review that we’ll do every year –
survey students and advisors and review how
well it’s functioning and where it needs to go.
Advisory Colleges is a great tool which we’ll
learn the uses of.
Integration Selective - Formal report was taken for
discussion with the following comments:
o The course is being developed year by year
with challenges due to cross registration and
its super imposition on a set of clinical
electives but it is making good progress.
o CC3/4 recommendation to have a Basic
Science Co-Director of this moving forward
which Dean’s Office will review. There’s a lot
of student projects that need to be reviewed.
o Idea of a group fourth year elective has been
attractive to Social Medicine. They might do
one on ethics or professionalism and embed it
in one of these other structures. Beat Steiner
in Family Medicine does this with New Models
of Care for the Underserved and it works well.
o A question is: How important is the patient
care component. Kurt Gilliland (within
Anatomy) does hysterectomies on cadavers
and other things. It appears to work well. The
consensus of the group is that we need to
insist on patient care but be flexible about
how it was interpreted. There may be other
themes other than Anatomy that work well for
that as well.
 Overall, there was support for the document. It’s

moved a long way. Key points emerged include:
o We discussed the role of the appendices at
some length. The consensus was to take them
out of the document and use them in tracking
or other processes. There’s a tension between
choosing a too limited series of diseases but
Action Items
Send text edits to Lisa
by Friday to finalize.
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o
o
o
there is also value in helping block/clerkship
directors determine curriculum.
What’s the best criteria for choosing
conditions? It’s important to patients in NC as
well as a particular interest nationally and
globally.
We also need to embed some element of
updatability – that is we will review this on an
going basis - not only the document but the
list of conditions.
Managing the health of the populations will
require new curriculum and perhaps a new
course.
The next step will be vertical integration. We
will try to come up with six small task forces to
assess where students should be at each year
for each competency. The CC leaders will
nominate people; having a template will help
the process.

With the help of CC
leaders, Newton will
follow-up with charge
for each task force,
with goal of reviewing
templates at the next
meeting.
o
System for Quality
Improvement


Medical knowledge may need more people
because there’s more to it and it’s difficult to
sort out what is year 1 and year 2. However,
these groups should not get into the specifics
of particular content areas.
Newton reviewed the ideas behind the “straw man”
and the discussion focused on:
o What’s the definition of outcomes and how
should we move forward? This includes not
only objective outcomes but also longer term
outcomes and we will have to decide what we
think are critical.
o We’ve got IOM recommendations along these
lines but we need to be explicit.
o Perhaps this can be something that we can
discuss in the strategic review.
Another issue is which data would actually be
available at which time. It might be that we
need to sort what is May and what is
September but in general people thought this
was an overall process and were comfortable
with a combination of “bottom up” and “top
down”.
What’s the purpose of mapping? To some extent, it’s
just a classification of where things are taught but we
don’t want to drive down into too much detail. The
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ICM

pillars are going to be the competencies and vertical
integration should be around those instead of specific
diseases.
Newton reviewed the report and his follow-up
discussion with students. He described a proposal for
major surgery on ICM including: a) splitting the course
into two groups, b) taught each by both a generalist
and specialist among people who saw patients both in
the inpatient and outpatient setting. The budget
would be flexible within the current year. Once we
define clinical skills progression – and hence know,
faculty should consider many substantial changes
including changes in the community week, changes in
size of precepting groups and emphasis on live
patients as opposed to standardized patients.

Other Ideas:


New Medical
Education Building


Affirm the importance of community medicine as
a key element of the week and make better use of
ICM weeks.
There is real value in getting outside of Chapel Hill
to different sorts of practices.
Newton described the building and the planning
process that is underway. He described the decision
between organizing it around Advisory Colleges or
expanded homerooms, a la Berryhill. There was
complete consensus that we wanted to move forward
with the Advisory College because of the opportunity
for vertical integration moving forward.


The consensus of the
group was to move
forward with
significant change,
recognizing that it
would take place over
multiple years. ICM
faculty come up with
ideas and come back
made sense.
Integrating it into the
clinical skills vertical
curriculum is also
important.
Newton will identify
course leaders after
discussion with
leaders.
Consensus:
Recruitment for
primary care is not an
objective of the
course.
Consensus: Organized
space around Advisory
Colleges.
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