We describe several themes below. We host group mentoring by meeting monthly for discussion on core topics which will enable the core faculty to work collaboratively together to facilitate the learning of our group of faculty scholars.
Description
Leadership Excellence in Educating for Professionalism (LEEP) is a faculty development program that focuses on core areas of medical professionalism: professional identity formation, organizational professionalism, resilience and wellness, assessment and remediation, communication and AI, ethics as well as a reimagined professionalism with a focus on restorative justice, critical consciousness, and moral development.
These topics were chosen because they are relevant to all health professionals and place emphasis on team-based inter-professional education and the learning environment. These topical areas also remain inadequately addressed in many health professions schools and post-graduate programs.
Goals
LEEP aims to strengthen faculty expertise and career development of trainees to:
1. Implement undergraduate (UME) and residency or fellowship (GME) curricula, and faculty development programs.
2. Implement assessment programs using self-assessment, work-place assessment, competency assessment, objective structured clinical examinations (OSCEs), e-portfolios, and instruments of moral and ethical reasoning.
3. Understand and analyze the role of organizational culture in shaping professional identities and professionalism behaviors and develop skills in achieving organizational change to foster wellness and professionalism.
4. Enhance the understanding of interprofessional cooperation in the delivery of healthcare.
Curriculum Threads
1. Professional Formation
2. Faculty Development
3. Organizational Professionalism
4. Resilience and wellness – personal and organizational
5. Restorative justice and community engagement
6. Inter-professional Education
7. Assessment and Remediation
8. Communication and AI
Curriculum Description
In addition to monthly discussion roundtables, conducted virtually, LEEP faculty scholars will participate in workshops focusing on core content and skills hosted virtually.
1. Professional Formation
Description:
The various health care professions have a contract with society to act in ways that affirm the highest ideals of their professions, including beneficence, respect for patient autonomy and social justice. Health care practitioners are expected to be committed to excellence, lifelong learning, honesty, integrity and compassionate care. To reach these ideals, trainees face predictable challenges that can lead to moral distress and erosion of empathy. But trainees also learn from their experiences, their mentors and peers, and can grow personally and professionally. Indeed, it is a central goal of health care education to promote the professional formation of trainees. There is much known about the theory and practice of promoting the personal and professional growth of healthcare trainees. This fellowship will work with faculty to enhance their abilities to be institutional leaders in promoting professional formation in their trainees.
Learning Objectives:
1. Choose a focused project to promote an enhanced understanding, appreciation or teaching of professional formation at their institution.
2. Develop an expertise related to professional formation, including the following: socialization and professional identity formation, principles for supporting and assessing programs in professional identify formation and practical considerations for developing and maintaining such programs.
Core content: Medicine's social contract and professional expectations, socialization, role models and mentors, communities of practice
Skills: Teaching methodologies, resources, assessment related to professional formation
2. Faculty Development
Description:
The faculty development thread will enhance skills in teaching professionalism, humanism, and communication. Participants will be encouraged to evaluate the goals of their own health care system and professionalism curricula and create programs to strengthen faculty skills as an ingredient to successful curriculum implementation at the UME, GME and practicing physician level. This thread examines teaching strategies and evaluation methods.
Learning Objectives:
1. Enhance knowledge and skills used in teaching professionalism and humanism, such as small group facilitation, and narrative reflection.
2. Enhance knowledge and skills used in teaching self-reflection and feedback to colleagues around communication.
3. Implement training in types of professionalism learning strategies within the clinical environment such as role modeling, mentoring, coaching and bed-side ethics.
Core content: Develop expertise in supporting and developing a faculty development program which support the teaching and evaluation of professionalism, humanism, and communication
Skills: The program examines understanding different teaching strategies and evaluation methods.
3. Organizational Professionalism
Description:
Over the course of medicine’s modern day professionalism movement, professionalism largely has been framed as an issue of individual motives and behaviors. This thread on organizational professionalism will shift this framing in three respects: (1) how organizational structures and processes themselves define and influence the professionalism of individuals including what is (and what is not) considered professionalism, (2) how organizations themselves might be thought of as embodying the principles and practices or professionalism, and (3) how we might think of organizations as loci of purpose and agency in their own right - independent of their members.
Learning Objectives:
1. Develop a theoretical framework for understanding organizational behavior.
2. Enhance knowledge and skills to map and decode formal professionalism initiatives across the organization.
3. Design strategies to reframe professionalism issues from an organizational and systems perspective.
Core content: hidden curriculum, communities of practice, creating institutional professionalism standards, accreditation requirements, social justice and community engagement
Skills: organizational assessment, leadership in institutional change
4. Resilience and Wellbeing
Description:
Resilience means cultivating, protecting and restoring personal and professional integrity in the face of adversity. Integrity is multidimensional and includes alignment and integration of personal and professional identities, morality and actions, work and life, and physical, emotional, social, and spiritual wellbeing. Scholars are encouraged to explore individual or systems perspectives on resilience related to clinical practice, education and training, or the wellbeing of practitioners and communities of practice.
Learning Objectives:
1. Apply an evidence-based understanding of resilience to better address the consequences of stress on health care providers including burnout, vicarious trauma, moral suffering and injury, negative effects on mental and physical health, and work-life imbalance.
2. Develop greater personal buoyancy and coping capacity through methods based in mindfulness, compassion-responsiveness and narrative medicine.
Core content: mindfulness, self-awareness, reflection, interprofessional collaboration and communication
Skills: mindfulness practice, narrative and reflective writing, reasoning through ethical and moral dilemmas, priority setting for healthy living and leadership
5. Restorative Justice, Critical Consciousness and Community Engagement
Description:
The social justice thread will focus on implementing programs designed to transform curricula, the learning environment and clinical care to promote equity, diversity and belonging, and cultivate a more critical consciousness to address racism and bias. Participants will be encouraged to evaluate the goals of their own health professions curricula, as well as programs and resources provided by clinics, hospitals and health systems to determine if and to what degree they effectively engage local and disadvantaged communities to create trust, promote health and foster accountability.
Learning Objectives:
1. Discuss conceptional frameworks on restorative and critical consciousness and how these can be used to shape admissions, curricula and assessments of professional formation.
2. Discuss the history of discrimination in health care delivery, accreditation, and admissions, and how this history continues today in disparities, structural racism and inequity in access to health professions training.
3. Implement training in restorative justice to positively shape the learning and clinical environment.
4. Implement training in responding to discriminatory actions in health professions education and in clinical care.
5. Design programs to promote community engagement and outreach.
Core content: implicit bias, discrimination in the workplace and its impact on faculty and trainees, health equity, moral and ethical development, and restorative justice
Skills: implementing principles of community engagement; addressing workplace discriminatory and disrespectful behavior from patients, faculty and staff; using restorative justice principles and the circle techniques
6. Interprofessional Education
Description:
The Interprofessional Education (IPE) thread will trace the history of interprofessional education as a mandate for 21st century health education and clinical care. Using the most recent Inter-professional Education Competencies, participants will evaluate ways in which interprofessional education experiences within their own institutions can improve teamwork, communication and collaboration in order to improve the health of patients and their communities. .
Learning Objectives
1. Discuss the history of IPE and how IPE currently effects health care education.
2. Assess the barriers to implementation of an IPE experience.
3. Develop knowledge and skills to operationalize a successful IPE experience.
4. Design and implement an Interprofessional experience for learners within your home institution.
Core content: interprofessional education, teamwork, communication, collaboration, curriculum development, role clarity and interprofessional professionalism
Skills: assessment of group dynamics, structured debriefing and feedback, creative curriculum development using multi-factorial experiences such as gaming, simulation, didactics, role playing and group discussion
7. Assessment and Remediation
Description:
The assessment and remediation thread will focus on the importance of comprehensive and longitudinal assessments of professionalism competencies (Knowledge, Skills and Attitudes) across the continuum of learning. We will review various assessment methodologies (e.g., OSCEs, self-assessment, 360 evaluations, narrative, work-based assessments) and tools developed by experts and national organizations. Additionally, we will explore ways to address professionalism lapses with feedback; and how to intervene if a professionalism lapse warrants remediation.
Learning Objectives:
1. Discuss Miller’s Pyramid and its relevance to professional formation and professionalism assessment
2. Discuss the advantages and disadvantages of various assessment strategies and tools.
3. Plan a comprehensive and longitudinal assessment strategy that includes multiple types of feedback and spans multiple learner levels.
4. Design a remediation plan for learners who demonstrate professionalism lapses related to knowledge, skills and/or attitudes.
Core content: professionalism assessment tools and strategies, longitudinal assessments, remediation
Skills: needs assessment, planning, implementation and evaluation of professionalism assessment and remediation programs
8. Communication and AI
Description:
The Communication and AI thread will focus on methods of engaging learners and faculty on effective communication with description of strategies to provide feed-back to optimize communication in a clinical encounter and between learner and teacher. The newly emerging area of AI will be included to engage LEEP fellows and faculty to think through how AI impacts PIF, ethical and moral development, and organizational professionalism.
Learning Objectives:
1. Discuss different forms of AI and how they can be used in education and patient care
2. Discuss efforts to develop ethical frameworks for use of AI
3. Describe implementation of ethical frameworks for monitoring use of AI across educational and clinical services
4. Describe the challenges and benefits of AI to the field of professionalism
Program Requirements
To successfully complete the LEEP certificate, all participants are expected to:
1. Be an APHC member
2. Attend at least one of the two APHC (virtual and/or in-person) conferences
3. Participate in monthly LEEP discussion groups (hosted virtually)
4. Participate in communication with assigned APHC mentor (or group facilitated mentoring)
5. Practicum - design and implement a mentored curriculum project at the participant's home institution
6. Present your mentored project or progress toward its completion for LEEP fellows and faculty
Time Commitment
The program will last 12 months and include a half-day pre-course, monthly seminars and monthly mentored sessions. All LEEP faculty scholars will be invited to present their work during the last sessions of the program and at an APHC annual meeting.
Cost
Participation fee is $900 (this fee does not include cost of conference registration, travel, food or lodging for attendance at the APHC annual meeting; APHC conferences are offered in a hybrid format – virtual and in-person. Scholarships are available to help meet tuition or travel expenses.