A select group of faculty members of the Brody School of Medicine at East Carolina University are embarking on a year-long professional development program designed to develop skills for implementing new practice design and new curricula for today’s environment of team-based care.
These faculty are the first group to take part in the school’s Teachers of Quality Academy (TQA), which will equip them to adopt and teach patient safety, quality improvement, team-based care and population health. Participants also will receive specific training in medical education principles, curriculum development and implementing innovative new educational models.
Although Brody initially planned to kick off the program with a group of 20 faculty members, the school decided to increase the cohort to 37 members in response to the faculty’s overwhelming interest in participating. TQA participants will undergo advanced training, develop projects to apply their skills across the health system, train students in these concepts and evaluate the outcomes of both clinical and educational interventions.
Members of this first multidisciplinary group include faculty from medicine, nursing, public health and allied health and range from senior residents with an interest in academic medicine to senior faculty who have years of experience in health care and education.
“We should be able to make substantial changes to our curriculum of the medical school with broad-based support from a large number of faculty,” said Elizabeth Baxley, MD, senior associate dean for academic affairs at Brody School of Medicine. “The synergy of this group promises to be very exciting.
”This week they begin the important work of helping to transform our clinical environment while also developing training models to better prepare tomorrow’s health professional students for a changing—and more effective—health care system.”
The TQA is a core component of the Brody School of Medicine’s Redesigning Education to Accelerate Change in Healthcare (REACH) project, for which the school received an AMA grant as part of the AMA’s Accelerating Change in Medical Education initiative.
The REACH program will augment the school’s core curriculum to include longitudinal education in patient safety, quality improvement, team-based care and population health. It also will place an emphasis on integration with other health-related disciplines to foster interprofessional skills and prepare students to lead health care teams.
Brody is one of 11 grant recipients in the AMA’s Accelerating Change in Medical Education initiative, which seeks to transform medical education to prepare students for tomorrow’s health care environment through bold, rigorously evaluated innovations.
