Members of the UWSOP CI Guidance Team shared their thoughts from last meeting’s visit from Dr. Michael J. Ryan, Associate Dean for Curriculum, and Dr. Karen McDonough, Second-Year Program Lead from the School of Medicine, and Dr. Joel Berg, Dean of the School of Dentistry.
While differences in their process, model, and implementation approaches were noted, several themes were present throughout, including:
- The need for health care professionals, including pharmacists to be able to approach care by seeing the patient as a whole person
- The opportunity for learning is not just the technical skills or knowledge but importantly, the “soft skills” such as interpersonal ability
- Cultural expectations around curriculum design/ownership, institutional and organizational opportunities
- The importance of early clinical experience, teaching content with context
- Matching instructional methods to achieve the intended learning: knowing when active learning, Socratic learning, or other methods are most helpful
- Understanding how today’s students learn, different instructional methodology, how to support faculty instructional development, using class time differently/empowering students to prepare before (the Guidance Team is looking forward to hearing more about this from Katie Taylor from the School of Education on June 2nd)
- How to engage faculty, students, alumni, and industry/pharmacy practitioners in the process
- The importance of industry trends, patient needs, expert insights about the future, data-driven decisions
- Healthcare reimbursement based on outcomes rather than procedures
- Assessment/measures of baselines vs. outcomes, allowing for continuous improvement: pilot programs, building in time between courses for breaks/remediation/correction mid-year, multiple instructors for courses, core values/threads/themes in every course, ongoing student feedback/assessment/metric reporting via dashboards
The Guidance Team also discussed near term events, including the May 17th Panel of guests from other Schools of Pharmacy, the June 3rd Northwest Pharmacist Conference and our focus group.
We are here to guide the process, not be the process.
Looking ahead, the Guidance Team anticipates developing goals and outcome measures by which to guide and assess the curricular innovation process (and later, curricular goals), and deliver a report to the Dean by late fall with recommendations for the next steps, with the understanding that the entire process will take at least a year before any changes are implemented.