Home Government Affairs Newsroom Meetings Publications	Shopping Cart Site Map

March, 2002 Reporter Home

New Academic Medical Center Planned for Downtown Las Vegas

New Task Force Hopes to Strengthen Chairs Roles as Institutional Managers

Culture Clash

Leadership Q&A

COD Fellowship Program

A Word from the President

Reporter Archive

AAMC Newsroom

Managing Editor
Scott Harris
sharris@aamc.org

Staff Writer
Elissa Fuchs
efuchs@aamc.org

New Task Force Hopes to Strengthen Chairs' Roles as Institutional Managers

By Barbara A. Gabriel

The AAMC has recently created a new Chairs Task Force within the association's Council of Academic Societies (CAS). Headed by Lloyd Michener, M.D., chair of the Department of Community and Family Medicine at Duke University Medical Center, the task force was formed to help support and strengthen the roles of medical school chairs as institutional managers. "An academic medical center is probably one of the most complex and chaotic environments to lead within the multitude of U.S. business enterprises, and managing one unit of such a system is one of the most challenging and interesting jobs imaginable," says Dr. Michener. Task force members were chosen to represent a broad range of department heads at U.S. medical schools. "They come from public and private, large and small, and research-intensive and community-oriented schools. The task force includes basic science and clinical chairs, men and women, and older and younger faculty," explains Dr. Michener.

The CAS Chairs Task Force has been charged with three missions:

advise the AAMC on the development and organization of informational resources that will help chairs better manage and evaluate their departments;
organize a Chairs Objectives Project to describe the attributes chairs must possess to fulfill their institutional missions; and
identify issues, develop meeting programs, and propose initiatives to the CAS Administrative Board related to the interests of medical school chairs.

Each of these tasks, says Dr. Michener, is essential in assisting the departments that compose academic medical centers to operate smoothly and effectively.

"There was concern that the AAMC needed to better understand the issues specific to department chairs and support them in their institutional roles," Dr. Michener affirms. "Often chairs find themselves flying blind with inaccurate or misleading information." To help chairs become better managers, the task force has sought to identify clear, accurate data, metrics, and benchmarking tools to help them measure their progress both individually and in relation to other medical schools.

But the task force's current principal initiative, the Chairs Objectives Project (COP), is its most ambitious project to date. It seeks to tackle the task force's core mission from the ground up by clarifying what it means to be a chair, the nature of the position, and what it takes to succeed in this important role. The COP will play a complementary role to the ongoing efforts of Julien Biebuyck, M.D., senior consultant for academic management programs in the AAMC Division of Medical School Affairs, to produce a publication defining good practices in the recruitment, selection, appointment, and development of medical school chairs.

Modeled on the AAMC's highly successful Medical Schools Objectives Project, the COP attempts to define the core attributes, values and attitudes, and knowledge and skills of effective medical school department chairs. These attributes have been delineated in a document drafted by a panel drawn from the task force. "This document is designed to stimulate discussion among chairs' groups, deans, and the heads of teaching hospitals to determine the desirable qualities of a modern medical school chair and what it takes for them and their institutions to succeed," notes Dr. Michener.

Dr. Michener hopes that the COP will help medical schools avoid what he perceives as the current trial-and-error method of selecting department chairs. "In some schools, incoming chairs are selected for their research prowess or their clinical expertise, and very few of them have substantial managerial or leadership experience," Dr. Michener explains. "Our way of treating chairs is to give them a period of time to try out their new role and, if they don't succeed, to find somebody else. That's a very expensive and painful way to manage large units, and it's pretty tough on the individuals involved. What we're arguing in this document is that running a department is a learnable skill that takes certain inherent attributes as well as managerial training."

To address issues specific to basic science chairs, the AAMC also recently established the CAS Basic Science Chairs Leadership Forum, composed of three representatives from each CAS-member basic science chair society. William Dantzler, M.D., Ph.D., says the principal mission of the forum is to "bring together basic science heads from across the country in all of the basic science disciplines in order to discuss common concerns." Its second mission, says Dr. Dantzler, who co-chairs the forum with Antonio Scarpa, M.D., Ph.D., professor and chair of the Department of Physiology and Biophysics at Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine, is to "raise the visibility of basic science departments and their concerns within the AAMC."

Dr. Dantzler, who is professor and head of the Department of Physiology at the University of Arizona College of Medicine, lists the debate over where basic science departments fit in medical schools undergoing significant organizational and curricular change as a major concern of basic science chairs across the country. Economic constraints, how to reward effective teaching, recruiting, and mentoring are other issues Dr. Dantzler ranks high among the common concerns of the heads of basic science departments.

These and other issues will be addressed when the forum holds a National Conference of Basic Science Chairs on Oct. 10-13, 2002, in Philadelphia. Dr. Dantzler says the steering committee organizing the conference will extend invitations to every basic science chair in the country. "We're going to address problems that involve everyone," affirms Dr. Dantzler. "There will be commonalities as well as differences; knowing what they are will help us decide how to collectively approach issues in the future."