Many of our faculty were doing clinical practice only on a volunteer basis,
at Federally Qualified Health Centers and other programs around the city and
state. I felt they needed more practice opportunities.
Many of the faculty had come here from full-time practice or full-time academic
work and were excited to be part of a new medical school. But I knew
eventually we’d need to recruit the next generation of faculty that would look
more like the students than like me.
We clearly had gone through issues with accreditation in the past, and it was
obvious that we’d need to prepare carefully for the next full LCME reaccreditation
site visit, set for 2011. I’d need to appoint a self-study steering committee
and faculty accreditation lead. I was fully confident that, based on my experience
with accreditation, we should have no problem.
We needed to identify where we were with our research program. We had
spent our first eight years developing an outstanding educational program and
the distributed model of medical education at our campuses. There was some
concern that we’d have mission creep and become more research-intensive. My
message to the faculty was that we’d never be a research-intensive medical school
but should concentrate on five or six areas where we could be leading-edge.
We needed to identify how we would better integrate the regional campuses
and accommodate class-size increases as we gradually moved up to a class size
of 120 per year. That would mean increasing the number of faculty available to
teach, particularly in our new and expanded campuses at Sarasota, Fort Pierce
and Daytona Beach. Some campus deans felt that we had a Tallahassee-centric
model – and, given that they were responsible for 50 percent of our medical students’
education, they wanted more say in decision-making, medical leadership
and curricular redesign. I appointed Dr. Paul McLeod senior associate dean for
the regional campuses in addition to his role as Pensacola campus dean, to give
them a seat at the table of senior leadership.
I instructed my information technology chief and my financial officer to be
much more customer-focused in how we reached out to the regional campus
administrators, to make sure they had everything they needed. Email, web services,
digital library access, teleconferencing – all would be critical for success in
a distributed model of medical education.
I noted that we had a very discipline-based curriculum and that I really
wanted to redesign it, but we delayed it until after our very successful accreditation
visit in 2011.
Since we were sharing our only development officer with the College of
Nursing, I made it clear that I’d need much more support to raise money for our
programs. The first development officer I hired full time asked: “Since we have
no grateful patients, and no alumni to speak of, how are we supposed to raise
money?” I believed that, with the amazing programs at our regional campuses,
we could develop friends at each one.
126 | Breaking the Mold