Physician faculty in specialties other than family medicine or geriatrics have
their academic appointment in the Department of Clinical Sciences. Clerkship
faculty located on the regional clinical campuses have academic appointments
in the appropriate clinical department, through which they are evaluated and
promoted.
The innovative, integrated departmental structure keeps the college’s focus
on medical education and fits with the emerging interdisciplinary nature of
health care delivery and research across the medical sciences. This interdisciplinary
model promotes educational and research collaboration across traditional
boundaries. Departmental research facilities in the basic sciences have been
built to facilitate collaboration, with open laboratories and shared core facilities.
Mutual respect and teamwork are core values among the faculty, as well as the
students, in the College of Medicine.
CHALLENGES AND ACCOMPLISHMENTS
To bring the vision for the new medical school to life, several challenges had
to be faced and major tasks had to be accomplished in a relatively short period of
time. In response to the law enacted by the legislature, the admission process for
the new medical school’s first class began in 2000. The Class of 2005 was admitted
in May 2001. In February 2005, the FSU College of Medicine received full
accreditation from the LCME, becoming the 126th accredited allopathic medical
school in the United States, the first such school accredited in over 20 years,
the first new allopathic medical school in the United States in the 21st century,
and the newest member of the AAMC. The inaugural class, the Class of 2005,
graduated on May 21, 2005.
INITIAL CHALLENGES
Accreditation. The greatest challenge which initially faced the new college
of medicine was to develop a nontraditional medical education model that fully
met the LCME standards for accreditation. The accreditation of the first new
medical school in the United States in over two decades, particularly a medical
school that is quite different in structure and clinical training model from traditional
medical schools, required extensive work and contact between the new
college and the LCME.
The LCME accreditation process as it existed in 2001 was set up for mature,
fully developed medical schools. The format of the LCME database was designed
to report information on such schools, making it difficult for a new nontraditional
school to describe its programs and development. Dealing with the accreditation
of the first new medical school in about 20 years, one that had been set on
a very fast track for development by Florida law, required the LCME to consider
118 | Breaking the Mold