In this section:
Strategic Leadership
Presenters: Barbara Barnes, MD, MS, FSACME and Morris Blachman, PhD, FACEHP, FSACME
Summary - This workshop was designed to assist participants in developing and exercising leadership skills within their institution, SACME and the field of CPD. Pre-work included review of several key articles on relevant issues of leadership, identification of their own personal challenges in becoming leaders, and a commitment to change with a 6 month follow-up. Participants, from the U.S., Canada, and Australia, worked in various administrative and academic roles. The session began with a discussion about how to exercise power and implement the value proposition for CPD in their own institutional context and included how to implement change through tools such as power mapping in the volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous environments in which we operate. The facilitators illustrated leadership challenges and opportunities by sharing some of their own experiences. Participants broke into small groups to identify challenges to exerting their own leadership, including engagement of key stakeholders, institution hierarchies and silos, and addressing competing priorities. Potential strategies addressed included defining, and knowing how to present, the CPD value proposition, building strategic relationships, rebranding CME, and more clearly defining unit objectives in strategic alignment with their institution. Finally, participants were asked to refine their commitment to change statements, define strategies enhancing their leadership positions in their own institutions and the field, and be prepared to share results in six months.
Key lessons learned for CME/CPD practice - The group expressed significant interest in ongoing leadership development, but also recognized significant challenges to accomplishing this unit and institutional levels. The workshop revealed significant interest and opportunities to define the academic CPD value proposition and support SACME members in becoming effective leaders. Administrative structures, scopes of programming and responsibility, and institutional expectations for CPD units vary greatly among our institutions. As a result, leadership development within our field must be adapted to accommodate these variations, longitudinal, and multifaceted.
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Program Evaluation and Assessing for Change
Presenters: Walter Tavares, PhD and David Wiljer, PhD
Summary - Continuing professional development (CPD) strategies are critical to sustained life-long learning. The aim of these programs is to promote improvement on a wide range of features associated with effective and high-quality care. However, demonstrating the impact of CPD programs has been and continues to be a challenge. This has resulted in a renewed call for assessing and measuring practice change in these contexts. In this workshop, we highlighted key theories, principles and outcome frameworks that inform the development of program evaluation designs and more specifically the assessment plans that are used as part of those frameworks. We guided participants to think about how different theoretical perspectives can help inform program evaluation and in particular outcome frameworks that can support the assessment of change. Participants were provided with examples of CPD evaluation approaches as well as samples of various outcome frameworks. We also included an experiential portion where participants had the opportunity to apply elements of various theoretical perspectives and outcomes intended to help shape assessment of change in their program evaluation designs.
Key lessons learned for CME/CPD practice - Key lessons included the following: (a) the program evaluation should be part of the educational development process; (b) focusing on outcomes can assist in the structuring of educational strategies; (c) consider established outcome frameworks to support outcome selection; (d) use conceptual/theoretical frameworks to further outcome insights and selection; (e) allow for unintended / unexpected outcomes; (f) we focused on outcomes, but development and processes matter too.
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Creating a Faculty Development Program for CPD
Presenters: Don Moore, PhD, Ajit Sachdeva, MD, Nels Carlson, MD, Gary Smith, PhD, and Miriam Uhlmann, MD
Summary - Creating a Faculty Development Program for CPD, a workshop that included four panel presentations and four small group discussions were held on Wednesday, February 17, 2021, from 1:00 to 4:00 pm during the SACME virtual annual meeting. The workshop is part of the ongoing discussion about the meaning of the term Continuing Professional Development which is increasingly being used to describe the work that members of SACME do. A more immediate catalyst was a presentation at the 2020 annual meeting of SACME. At that meeting, Yvonne Steinert, PhD, an internationally recognized expert on faculty development challenged us to consider a broader focus for faculty development in CPD as well as an expanded menu of approaches in our faculty development activities. Specifically, she suggested that we:
- Recognize that faculty development should have an important role to play in academic career development in CPD.
- Consider that faculty development in CPD should address all faculty roles in CPD, including not only the important traditional roles related to teaching but also the increasingly important roles of researchers and scholar as well as a leader and administrators in CPD.
- Explore a range of formal learning activities (workshops and short courses) and informal learning experiences like those in the workplace and in communities of practice. Faculty development in individual settings in addition to group settings should also be considered.
- A committee of SACME members, coordinated by the Academy of SACME Fellows, was formed to address the faculty development challenges presented by Dr. Steinert and immediately began planning a workshop as a pre-conference experience at the 2021 SACME Annual Meeting.
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To prepare the participants for meaningful discussion, short presentations were made at the start of the workshop by Drs. Nels Carlson and Gary Smith from academic medical centers, and Miriam Uhlmann from a specialty society. Each speaker described a unique option for organizing CPD and faculty development in their organizations. Dr. Steinert followed with a commentary on the presentations, highlighting where they demonstrated some of the suggestions she made.
Just under 30 SACME members signed up for the workshops. They were assigned to four groups with a facilitator and a scribe. The small groups were asked to:
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- Examine the potential for broadening the scope of their faculty development programs;
- Explore the potential for expanding the approaches that are used in their faculty development programs;
- Discuss the opportunities and challenges that might be encountered as a new faculty development program was created or a current program was revised;
- Identify additional assistance that the SACME Academy Faculty Development Committee could provide as they planned to develop the best possible faculty development initiatives for their CPD program.
There was a considerable of excitement for faculty development expressed during the workshop. We have a considerable number of ideas from the notes taken by the scribes that we plan to use going forward with a faculty development initiative for SACME members.
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Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Toolkit for Planners & Presenters at the University of Wisconsin-Madison
Presenters: Barbara Anderson, MS, Cassandra Nytes and Marianna Shersheva, MD, PhD
Summary - In 2019, University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health (UWSMPH) students created the UWSMPH Presenter's Guide that provides suggestions to medical school-teachers about how to discuss topics relating to underrepresented communities. The UW-Madison Interprofessional Continuing Education Partnership (ICEP) team has supported the work of a medical student to develop a Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) Toolkit that is based on the UWSMPH Presenter's Guide and tailored for use in accredited continuing education.
The toolkit, composed of a checklist, reflective questions, learning competencies, and evaluation questions, is designed to promote inclusive and equitable education practices in continuing medical education. It was developed by a medical student working together with continuing education professionals and experts in DEI. The toolkit is embedded in the ICEP program to keep all involved in planning and presenting content accountable for creating inclusive and equitable education. Components of the toolkit and examples of their use in activity planning documents, a faculty letter, a planning committee debrief, and evaluation templates were shared with the workshop participants. Participants provided feedback, practiced responding to reflective questions, and engaged in small groups and a large group discussions to exchange ideas for fostering diversity and inclusion in educational settings and practices.
Key lessons learned for CME/CPD practice - The long-term goal of the toolkit is to decrease bias and subsequent health disparities through inclusive continuing education practices and continuous consideration of equity and its application to healthcare. At the beginning of the workshop, participants reported how difficult it is/would be to implement a similar toolkit in their institution, indicating: easy—46%; difficult—31%, and not sure—23%. Resources on DEI for continuing education need to be responsive to patient populations and changing needs of clinicians and patients; encouraged rather than required for use; and open for feedback and shared learning about overcoming barriers to implementation.
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