various new issues. In terms of meeting the accreditation standards, what had to
be in place before provisional accreditation would be granted? What standards
should be applied at the early stages of development and how should they be
applied? There was a further problem of ambiguity in interpretation of some of
the standards.
One concrete example of the problem for the new medical school at FSU
was how the LCME dealt with the PIMS experience in the accreditation process.
The first-year medical education program had been in place at FSU for 30
years through PIMS. The FSU PIMS was site-visited in the spring of 2000 by
the LCME, and reaccredited with the University of Florida College of Medicine
in the summer of 2000 for another seven years. Though the FSU faculty who
taught the PIMS curriculum were currently teaching the first-year curriculum to
the FSU College of Medicine charter class, they were not counted as faculty of
the college because they were members of the faculty of the College of Arts and
Sciences. This was part of the rationale for denial of accreditation by the LCME
in 2002.
The impact of being denied provisional accreditation in 2002 on the new
College of Medicine was huge. There was a large amount of negative publicity—local,
state, and national—which made recruitment of students, staff, and
faculty more difficult during a critical time in the development of the college.
Recruitment of students was made even more difficult when FSU was removed
from the American Medical College Application Service (AMCAS) after ten
years of being a separate AMCAS school. The charter class of the college of medicine
was admitted through AMCAS. However, FSU’s AMCAS membership
was dropped without informing the College of Medicine, two weeks into the
new admission cycle for the college’s second class. This required that the college
of medicine generate its own electronic application process in a very short
period of time and resulted in a drastic reduction in total applications for the two
admission cycles in which FSU was out of AMCAS (from 1,100 a year while in
AMCAS to 470 in the second year outside AMCAS).
The College of Medicine continued to work with the LCME and as a result,
provisional accreditation was awarded in the second year of operation. During
this time, the LCME completely revised the database format, reduced the number
of standards, and added annotations that helped with interpretation of each
standard. The current database format and annotations are more flexible, allowing
all schools to report information pertinent to their program. This has significantly
improved the accreditation process for all U.S. medical schools.
Leadership change. Another challenge early in the college’s development was
a change in leadership in January 2003 when the dean and associate dean for
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