Minutes from the Curriculum Committee Kick Off Meeting
September 9, 2009
Topic
Attending:
Structure & Function of
Committee
Curriculum Overview &
Priorities for 09-10
Discussion
Gilliland, Cross, Rao, Shaheen, Byerley, Farrell,
Cairns, Bankaitis, Dreesen, Steiner, Bacon,
Perry, Fields, Felix, Bynum, Slatt, Stone,
Chhotani, Verma, Rebecca Chasnowitz, Dent,
Stewart
 Overall goal is to provide advice on
educational policy with attention to the
whole curriculum.
 Replaces CMPC. Management will be the
responsibility of the EAD and OME staff.
Constituency is broader to include Chairs,
AHEC faculty, Academy of Educators and CC
4 leadership. One seat is still open.
 The CC1, CC2, CC3/4 Committees will
report up to the Curriculum Committee.
Those committees will include course
directors of all of the courses and will be
responsible for ongoing management and
leadership of the curriculum across
individual years. I envision also the
development of individual task forces to
deal with issues that cross boundaries such
as ICM or clinical skills.
 Finally, in terms of office, each of the CC1,
CC2, CC3/4 leaders will be ex officio and
their term will depend on their term in
their other jobs. We will set a limited term
for the other representatives and organize
it so that representation and new
membership is staggered to improve
continuity. We will address these details
later.
 Newton presented what is known about
outcomes and the current curriculum. See
attached Powerpoint.
Action Items
Questions/comments included:
o
Do we have trend lines for most of
the outcome data? The answer is
“yes” but we have to go looking for
it. Easily available for admissions,
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CC1, CC2, CC3/4 Priorities

grades and scores.
o What do we know about retention
in NC? There is likely good data
that we need to develop. We have
it in part. This is one of the great
advantages of the possibility of
working with Sheps more closely.
o How much debt does our average
student have? $100,000 which is a
lot but puts us in the bottom
quartile of medical schools.
o What information do we have
about specialty choice? There is
some information but it’s not
organized in a helpful way – it is
global specialties rather than
subspecialties. Our major goal for
the next year is to begin to frame
according to categories that the NC
Institute of Medicine put together.
o Any recent changes in MCAT
scores? Scores have gone up some
in the last year. Roughly 7 points is
a significant difference. After
changes in administration, there
was a major increase
approximately 8-9 years ago.
Represented orally. See their written
descriptions in the agenda.
Comments:
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LCME Action Plan

How will we achieve comparability across
sites? One45 has begun to allow us to get
data across sites and the clinical log will
begin to track experience. Lecture capture
will improve this as well but we need to
review the data on an ongoing basis. CC3/4
will be doing that with this committee
involved as necessary.
The spread of EHRs will be a significant
confounding effect on education. They
distract practices on both academic and
clinical.
The 2004 site visit yielded a follow-up site
visit in two years, putting UNC in the
bottom 16% in the country. This spring, an
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internal site review was done by Cam
Enarson, former Chair of the LCME who has
the achievement of having a perfect LCME
score when he was the head of medical
education at Wake Forest. The number of
possible citations identified by the task
force was substantial – the average number
of citations in a final report was something
like 6-10.
Some of the citations are relatively trivial
but there are many substantial areas and
they fall into three buckets:
o Facilities and resources.
o Administrative issues such as
appointments for faculty, Mission
statement reword.
o Curriculum – both overall
supervision as well as the
development of specific
competencies.
OME has engaged Lisa Slatt to coordinate
LCME process.
Key points:
o
o
o
o
Important to get LCME’s 2004
letter. Some of those were included
in the packet but we’ll send others
out.
What’s happened with
mistreatment? After many
interventions, our statistics have
improved to just above the national
average. This is quite positive.
Alan Cross reported that so far five
students have raised issues with
him this year. It’s mostly
processing and what the students
should do. So, it has not gone
away but is clearly better.
The graduation questionnaire is key
and confirms some of what has
been said around direct
observation of patient
examinations as well as some
mistreatment. We will review later
as a group.
A key issue is getting to

Slatt and staff will
be producing a
spreadsheet of
each of these
items—who is
responsible and
what’s the next
step—for the
committee to be
aware. Likewise,
we’ll follow-up
regarding LCME
2004 and
subsequent
discussions as
well as our most
recent
communication
to LCME.
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Focused Discussion #2 –
Faculty Development
competencies. What would be the
process for doing that. That has to
start with this Curriculum
Committee setting them for the
school and then breaking it down
year by year. At that stage, we
could involve Course Directors and
then some mapping structure
needs to be put in to facilitate the
process but after we’ve decided
what to do.
See Newton’s brief proposal. Alan Cross and
Kathleen Rao, speaking on behalf of the
Academy of Educators, enthusiastically
endorsed the proposal. They underscored that
the activities would be developed by the
Academy of Educators but would be available
to all faculty.
Other points in the discussion included:

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The Teaching Scholars has been very
helpful both in terms of content and in
terms of networking. They will
continue.
It’s important to develop a number of
different modalities based on time
available to faculty. So, individual face
to face seminars, the Teaching Scholars
but also possible web based and other
kinds of educational interventions.
Faculty development and competencies
in learning objectives fit into such an
Academy well.
It will be important to start going
quickly while we’re trying to construct
the overall plan. This is something we
can design while we’re building.
A key faculty need is precepting skills.
Needs both resources as well as
preceptors.
It’s important to put teaching
development in the context of overall
career faculty development. Current
efforts in the School of Medicine are
piecemeal, and quite variable from
department to department. Some
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Specific Topic Discussion #3:
Hours of the Curriculum
departments do better jobs of career
development than others. The context
is that the SOM faculty development
program has been almost exclusively
focused on the research side.
Educational development needs to get
more organized.
 What’s the role of Chairs in faculty
development? Dr. Bankaitis described
his approach – find talented people and
try to support them moving forward.
 A key issue is state support for
education. Underscore that only a
minority of the funds available are for
education. We need to get
accountability for state funds. Of note,
AHEC is very similar to on campuses.
Very little of their money comes from
the state.
Data comparing UNC to benchmark was
Consensus:
presented. Key questions were: Should we
change? If so, what’s the best process? There
1. We have too
was consensus that we were likely to be too
many hours, and
high in terms of hours and that we would need
too many in
to cut back. However, it’s difficult to know how
lecture in years 1
to do this until we’ve sorted out what our
and 2.
outcomes are.
2. We will defer
addressing them
It’s important to have some element of a “top
until we sort out
down” approach. CC3/4 adjustments showed
outcomes.
that it was very difficult for departments to give
up time.
Other comments:
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The gateway exam, if and when it
happens, will change the format. What
do we know about likelihood?
Consensus that we need to do this but
after we sort out what our outcomes
are.
Try to make process independent of
funds. This is an advantage of the
process we’ve used so far.
We need to have some zero based
budgeting approach for curriculum
hours – where we put in, we have to
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Outcomes Project


Organizing for the Work of
the Committee

take some out.
When we are at our best, what are we
doing? Please see Appendix A for a listing
of this.
What should the core key outcomes of our
medical school be – on graduation and in
10-15 years? Please see Appendix B.
There was consensus on a hybrid model the Curriculum Committee meeting 2 hours
every 2 months and task forces meeting in
between. Separately, the CC1, CC2, CC3/4
leaders can meet as an “educational
operations” group monthly.
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