Area Health Education Centers
Conference Call
In
Attendance: Carla See, Norman D. Ferrari III, Nancy Nedrow,
Carla Campbell, Malinda Turner, Kathleen Bors, Sarah Miller, JoAnn Raines,
Amber Crist, Amy Holbrook
Staff: Jodie
Jackson, Rose McCluskey, April Vestal, Jacki Novacich
The meeting began with
Norman Ferrari stating that WVU School of medicine is experiencing issues scheduling
3rd year family medicine rural rotations. It was feared that this would happen with the
increase in student numbers. Another
challenge is that schools are requiring their students to do their family
medicine rotations in July and August, causing preceptor availability in those
months to decrease.
The question was raised if
it is primarily an issue during July and August. Kathleen Bors stated that WVU-Charleston
Division has experienced some issues outside of those months.
Data was presented to the subcommittee
by Jodie Jackson and Rose McCluskey showing numerous denials of rotations after
April 30. Kathleen Bors clarified that
WVU-Charleston and WVU-Morgantown Campus are all following the April 1 guideline
of requests for rotations. In discussing
with the subcommittee, it was indicated that there were a crunch for spots, which
resulted in students' first and second requests being denied, but occurring much
later when students were to begin rotations within a short time period after
the discovery. This caused a panic resulting
in the school scheduler calling, e-mailing and placing many requests in TRACKER
to find placements for these students.
Jodie Jackson stated that this
was not the impression she received from the data and following discussions
with Site Coordinators. She said
sometimes students are listed more than once for different locations and she
did not remove those students from the data analysis. According to the data, there were quite a few
rotation requests added after April 30.
Looking at all the
rotations and when they were added, they were overwhelmingly dominated by WVSOM
in the early part. WVSOM sometimes
request rotations well in advance. One example
of this was discovered when Jodie called Northern WV Rural Health Education
Center (NWVRHEC) Region 1 to inquire about numerous denials. It was discovered that the consortium fills
rotations as the requests come into the consortium.
It was decided that there
is a need to reinforce the April 1 deadline, and not to fill rotation slots
until all requests are entered. The
exception to this is for disciplines that do not share preceptors with Medicine
(e.g. Pharmacy, Dentistry, and Nursing) and the requests are for a May or June
rotation. April Vestal will reinforce
this to the Site Coordinators, and their staff.
Some concern was still
present that this issue is related to having too many students and not enough
preceptors. Malinda Turner, Coordinator
for Eastern WV Rural Health Consortium, stated that the data is good, but too
many things factor into a denial of a requested rotation. A denial simply means you denied a rotation,
and it might be due to duplicate rotations, for example. A school may have placed a request for a
student 2 or 3 times for the same block for multiple consortia. Whichever consortia approved the rotation
would mean the others would have to deny the rotation. Malinda stated that she does not wait for a
school to delete the student, she will deny the request, and place a
comment indicating such in the comment
section. It was suggested that Coordinators
need to make sure they make the comment on why a rotation request was denied,
so we are not assuming it is due to lack of housing or preceptors. Jodie agreed that there were many factors in
rotation denials, and that the data shared only shows one small piece. We cannot tell without looking at comments
why it was denied.
Norman Ferrari asked if it
was felt that this was not really a problem that should be addressed. Jodie said that there would need to be
further analysis of the data in order to fully determine. Dr. Ferrari stated that from a school
standpoint, the schedulers had more problems finding rotations this past fall
than ever before. He would suspect the
reason for multiple requests was that the school was down to the wire on time
to locate a rotation for these students.
Rose McCluskey is trying to
create some solutions for multiple entries, but this does not address the issue
of consortiums being at capacity. Coordinators
on the call were asked if they were at capacity in July and August. Malinda stated that her family medicine
rotations were full and would not have been able to accept another
student. Carla Campbell, Coordinator for
Southern Counties Consortium, stated she was at 90% capacity, but she also was
dealing with a housing issue that made it hard to take more students. It was decided that Rose and Jodie would ask Site
Coordinators this question at their meeting on
Rose and Jodie will also look
at the data on denied rotations and their proximity to their campus, and if
rotations that were then found for those students had them traveling away from
the campus.
Rose discussed some
possible solutions to the multiple entries.
·
Allow
a certain number of multiple rotation requests per student to be entered.
·
Site
Coordinators can then either view the other rotations entered or would receive
a notification that this student has multiple entries for that period with
other consortia. This way Coordinators
can work together on rotations
One issue that was
addressed was that Site Coordinators do not know what rotations will look like
until April 2, and phone calls and emails inquiring about availability of a
rotation from schools should be refrained.
JoAnn Raines stated that
the Marshall Academic year does not end until the end of June for 3rd
year medical students, and traditionally we have had to request for May and
June rotations early on once we had rotations codified. The problem is that sometimes the requests
waiting for approval/verification, creates panic when you are trying to codify
their schedules. So, from a
Amy Holbrook informed the
group that WVSOM is looking to change the 3rd year students to having
the same academic year start time as that of the 4th year students,
which would be July 5th. They
will also do two 4 week rotations instead of the 8 week block. Rotations will expand out of family medicine
allowing students to do 4 weeks of RHEP and then 4 weeks of a non-RHEP
rotation. It is possible that this will
impact RHEP numbers, and it may open up family medicine rotations now for other
schools.
Carla Campbell said that we
need to create a criteria and guidelines instead of viewing the top three
choices.
Jodie stated that she is
not sure that all possibilities were exhausted for rotations.
Next Steps:
·
Rose
will look at possible solutions to multiple request issues and discussed with
the site coordinators.
·
Jodie
will review data with Kathleen Bors on Charleston Division rotation denial
problem.
·
April
will follow up with Site Coordinators on the April 1 deadline, and exceptions
to that deadline
With no further business,
the conference call was adjourned.