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    CFAS Rep Bulletin May 2023

    In this edition:

    • Message from the Chair
    • Biennial CFAS Academic Society Summit Returns in 2023
    • CFAS Spring Meeting Matierals Online
    • CFAS Connects: A Conversation with David Skorton
    • CFAS Society Profile: The Academy for Professionalism in Healthcare

    Message from the Chair

    Dear CFAS Colleagues and Friends,

    It’s hard to believe two months have passed since we met as a group in Salt Lake City for the 2023 CFAS Spring Meeting. But before we close the books on that amazing event, I want to pause for a moment and reflect on a few important things that arose there and highlight some lessons for the future.

    First, for those of you who attended, you no doubt noticed how positive and engaged it felt from beginning to end. While that experience no doubt was a result of excitement created by meeting in person for the first time since 2019, it was also related to the important topics we explored and the meaningful conversations we had. And this is not just a feeling – but a reflection of the data collected from the evaluation of the meeting.

    Every AAMC meeting receives a thorough evaluation using a series of benchmarked questions along with specific questions linked to the program offered. The 2023 Spring CFAS conference was the highest scoring meeting CFAS has ever had – significantly so – and ranked as a meeting that the AAMC staff responsible for managing the evaluation of all AAMC offerings declared as “extraordinary.” What was revealed in the evaluation went beyond simply approval of the program. The evaluation that I reviewed showed that we are in many ways an activist group that doesn’t merely want to “talk” about the challenges we face as academic medicine faculty, but that we wish to actively improve academic medicine in significant ways. As a group, we want to exercise our voice, influence decisions, and improve the relevance, environment, and prospects of academic medicine.

    That said, some comments from the evaluation revealed areas where we need to be mindful. For instance, whatever we can do to get more people and more perspectives aired would benefit all. There were some comments that suggested the views expressed at the meeting didn’t always reflect a full range of positions or perspectives. These are topics that are critically important to me and that I, as chair, have been addressing and will continue to address, not just in CFAS, but also at the AAMC broadly. And I know firsthand that it is also an issue of critical relevance to other CFAS Administrative Board members, AAMC Board of Directors members, and to AAMC President and CEO David Skorton.

    So what’s next for us? First, materials from the meeting – including short and detailed summaries to present to your faculty peers and society colleagues – are available on the CFAS website. These files are downloadable in PPT and PDF formats in case you wish to edit or add to them as appropriate for your purposes. Second, our next key in-person meeting is Learn Serve Lead: The 2023 AAMC Annual Meeting, which will be held in Seattle November 3-7, 2023. Registration will be opening in just a few weeks, and like last year in Nashville, there will be substantial programming for CFAS, including our committees, a business meeting, receptions, knowledge sharing, joint council meetings with COD and COTH, and an array of breakout sessions with a faculty focus, featuring CFAS voices. You’ll learn much more about that soon.

    And on Wednesday, May 24, we hosted another CFAS Connects session. The session featured the work of our newest CFAS committee, which debuted in Salt Lake City – the CFAS Committee for Faculty as Medical Educators, which seeks to identify issues and challenges of relevance to faculty who are engaged in medical education (both clinicians and biomedical science educators), developing opportunities to discuss these issues, and providing the faculty voice and perspective on educational matters that impact them, their learners, and their institutions.

    And finally, you’ll be getting an announcement soon on the 2024 CFAS Spring Meeting, which will be held jointly with the AAMC’s Group on Resident Affairs and the Organization of Resident Representatives in the Washington, DC, area, April 2-4, 2024.

    All of these events present real opportunities for you to share your perspectives, learn from colleagues, and ultimately, improve the environment for faculty, medicine, teaching, and research. We have come such a long way in the past couple of years given the challenges of meeting and gathering in person, increased workloads, societal and cultural upheavals, and the very real, very specific challenges each of us have faced as professionals in academic medicine. Not only have we survived, but we’ve grown personally and professionally and strengthened our impact. I look forward to continuing this journey with all of you.

    Yours in good health and wellness,

    Aviad “Adi” Haramati, PhD
    CFAS Chair
    Representing the Academic Consortium for Integrative Medicine and Health

    Biennial CFAS Academic Society Summit Returns in 2023

    The AAMC's Council of Faculty and Academic Societies (CFAS) invites academic society leaders to join the third biennial CFAS Academic Society Summit. This daylong conference will convene executives of AAMC-member societies along with AAMC leaders to create and reinforce a stronger connection between and among the association and its member societies. Through both presentations and knowledge-sharing discussion, attendees will learn about the priorities of not only the AAMC, but also their peer organizations and will have the opportunity to identify potential areas for aligning work and collaborations. There is no cost to attend the meeting, but attendees will be responsible for covering their travel and housing costs, if needed.

    If you are a CFAS Academic Society rep, please share the information with your Academic Society executives and encourage their participation. If they are not able to attend, they are welcome to designate you as a representative in their place at the in-person event (all CFAS members are able to register for the virtual portion of the meeting, but in-person attendance is limited). This summit is a benefit of CFAS membership and we look forward to a day of active and engaging discussions about topics that are of most interest to our academic society members.

    2023 AAMC CFAS Academic Society Summit
    Monday, July 17, 2023
    9 a.m. - 3 p.m. (in-person meeting)*
    AAMC Learning Center
    655 K Street, NW, Washington, DC 20001
    *There is an option to attend the 9 a.m. - 12 p.m. portion of the meeting virtually for those who cannot be there in person.

    LEARN MORE AND REGISTER

    CFAS Spring Meeting Materials Online

    The 2023 CFAS Spring Meeting in Salt Lake City, Utah was the council’s first in-person spring meeting since 2019. We would like to thank everyone who contributed to making the meeting such a success!

    Summary materials of the meeting, including a longer summary and an abbreviated summary, are available in PowerPoint and PDF formats on the CFAS Resources webpage. The PowerPoint files are downloadable from the website, and reps who wish to use them as a presentation tool are invited to edit, make additions, or remove material as needed for your audience.

    CFAS Connects: A Conversation with David Skorton

    CFAS Connects returned on April 19 for another conversation with AAMC President and CEO David J. Skorton, MD. As always, David and CFAS leaders had a productive conversation about the wide range of issues facing faculty members today. Major themes of discussion included issues around funds flow, the role of research in academic medical centers, national policy trends affecting academic medicine, and how faculty leaders can forge lasting relationships with their institutional leadership, among other topics.

    A recording and summary notes of the conversation are available on the CFAS Resources webpage.

    And another CFAS Connects session held last week on Wednesday, May 24 provided an update on a new CFAS committee - Faculty as Medical Educators, which met for the first time at the 2023 CFAS Spring Meeting in March. CFAS leaders reviewed the objectives of this committee, presented the initial work of the committee, and provided a forum for CFAS reps to share their experiences. A recording of the session is available and summary notes will also be made available on the CFAS Resources page in the coming days.

    Finally, the next CFAS Connects session will take place on Wednesday, June 21 at 3pm ET. Detailed information about the appointment will be coming soon.

    CFAS Society Profile: The Academy for Professionalism in Health Care

    The Academy for Professionalism in Health Care (APHC) is one of the youngest CFAS member societies, celebrating its 10th anniversary last year. APHC has 327 members including physicians, nurses, pharmacists, physician assistants (PAs), dentists, medical educators, lawyers, and ethicists.

    “The mission of the Academy is to optimize patient care through professionalism education, scholarship, policy, and practice in all health-related fields. Members from many health care disciplines get together at two or more virtual and hybrid conferences each year and participate in monthly online roundtables. We offer mentorship through a national fellowship program for mid- and senior-level faculty from around the world. We collaborate on podcasts and a monthly newsletter. The APHC is an academic home for all who are interested in professionalism education, remediation, research and advocacy,” said Barbara Lewis, Managing Director of APHC.

    APHC’s main constituency is physician medical educators, but it’s broadening its membership base to all the health professions. APHC’s Board of Directors has a dentist, ethicist, pharmacist, lawyer, and PhD educator, reflecting the organization’s interprofessional focus. APHC now has a global reach and its most recent conference hosted participants from 20 countries.

    APHC was founded in 2012 as a product of Project to Rebalance and Integrate Medical Education (PRIME) that was funded by the Patrick and Edna Romanell Foundation for Bioethics Pedagogy at the University of Buffalo. Initially, APHC’s focus was on evaluating how medical ethics and humanities are foundational in professional formation in medical school. However, APHC has since matured into an organization that addresses medical professionalism issues across the spectrum of all health care professions.

    “APHC’s organizational focus – as well as the focus of its conference – is now toward advancing the study, research, and education of interprofessional professionalism inclusive of all health care training programs and professions,” said Thomas Harter, PhD, past president of APHC, the senior CFAS rep to APHC, and director of the Department of Bioethics and Humanities at Gundersen Health System. “I joined APHC after being directed to create a formal professionalism education curriculum for our Internal Medicine residency. I was early in my career and had little knowledge and no expertise in medical professionalism education. APHC provided me an opportunity to meet the field’s experts and learn what I didn’t know. Some of the most direct benefits of APHC are the education – having a central body to be able to go to is amazing and most of the leaders in the field of professionalism continue to present at the national conferences and participate with various APHC offerings, including its monthly Roundtables, Podcasts, newsletter, and the flagship Leadership Excellence in Educating for Professionalism (LEEP) certification program.”

    Dr. Harter went on to describe a beneficial collaboration that resulted from his membership in APHC. “Personally, the most beneficial collaboration through my involvement in APHC is with Dr. Gia Merlo. Dr. Merlo and I met nearly a decade ago during APHC’s third annual conference in Chicago. Presently, Dr. Merlo and I co-editing a textbook for Oxford University Press titled Medical Professionalism: Theory, Education, and Practice that we anticipate being available by spring of 2024. The textbook comprehensively covers theoretical underpinnings of medical professionalism, different components and models for teaching medical professionalism, and various issues in medical professionalism that occur at the individual and organizational levels of physician practice. Some of the practice topics include: lifestyle medicine, managing conscientious objections, physician dress, volunteer and mission work, military medical practice, special considerations in research, physicians as employees, aging out of medical practice, remediation, structural inequities in medical practice, health law, managing financial conflicts of interest, and organizational environmentalism.”

    Preston Reynolds, MD, PhD, MACP, past president of APHC and a professor of medicine in the UVA Division of General, Geriatric, Palliative and Hospital Medicine, was also interviewed for this profile. Dr. Reynolds wrote sections of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) related to Title VII, and is a former branch chief in the Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA). Dr. Reynolds served on the board of directors of Physicians for Human Rights (PHR) from 1987-2002. Dr. Reynolds was a co-recipient of the 1997 Nobel Peace Prize when PHR was awarded the prize for its pioneering research on the health impact of landmines, and for its role as founding member of the International Campaign to Ban Landmines.

    Dr. Reynolds described another benefit of membership in APHC: “access to the 15-month LEEP program, which I run. The program is comprised of 90 minute seminars with world experts on topics such as moral development, the social contract, professional identity formation, definitions of professionalism across the health professions, curriculum design, assessment and remediation, professionalism and social justice, faculty development for coaching, small group seminars and identity formation, wellness and resilience, organizational professionalism, professionalism in context of COVID-19, and the heightened need for raising awareness of health disparities and inequity. In this program, individuals are partnered with mentors and get to work on a project that impacts their institution, undergraduate, and graduate educational program, etc. Alumni of the program have gone on to become institutional leaders in professionalism and professional development; one has become a university president.”

    Dr. Reynolds also noted that APHC has graded membership prices based on projected income so that social workers and nurses can afford membership. Every month, APHC also provides a professionalism education roundtable that’s available to members. This is an hour-long conversation with an expert in the field and represents an opportunity to get deeper knowledge into the field. APHC members get discounts on use of an online professionalism curriculum, Professional Formation, developed at Drexel University in collaboration with many experts within the APHC.

    APHC has a newsletter that goes out to 20,000 people and provides its members with opportunities to write for the newsletter. The organization also hosts an annual meeting – that is now hybrid offering virtual and in-person attendance, and a mid-year virtual meeting. All members are encouraged to submit abstracts for oral presentation, panel discussions, workshops, and posters.

    Both Drs. Reynolds and Harter expressed interest in APHC and CFAS working together to make progress on issues of mutual interest.

    For example, APHC is very interested in policies that affect accreditation and the learning environment, such as LCME and ACGME guidelines. “We are encouraged by the AAMC’s DEI initiatives and would really like our other partners within society to equally commit to professional behaviors and anti-racism,” said Dr. Reynolds.

    “Issues around funding for medical education are definitely important to us. We agree with and work with CFAS and the AAMC on these issues. We want to be open minded on the kinds of activities we engage in on the policy level, and we are interested in anything that impacts professionalism. We want to optimize professionalism in health care and we don’t want to crowd anyone out, we want to hear what other voices are so we can help make better policies toward improving patient care,” said Dr. Harter.

    Tell Us How You’re Doing

    Please keep the lines of communication open so we can provide you with the resources and information that would be most useful. It is helpful for the AAMC to understand in detail what is happening on the ground at the medical schools, teaching hospitals, and academic societies we serve. Please email Eric at eweissman@aamc.org, or call directly at 301-437-2572 with updates or feedback from your perspective. You can also reach out with questions or comments to CFAS Communications Specialist Alex Bolt.

    If you are looking for information about CFAS, find what you need on our website, from the names of CFAS leaders, to updates on committee and working group initiatives, to upcoming offerings and meetings, and finally, current and previous editions of CFAS News.

    Do you have an article or study coming out? A new promotion or professional accomplishment? Let us know and we'll feature it in an upcoming edition of the CFAS Rep Bulletin.