A campaign approach to medical school programme objectives

Abstract

Context and setting In response to the Association of American Medical Colleges' (AAMC) Medical Schools Objective Project (MSOP) and Liaison Committee on Medical Education (LCME) accreditation standards, institutions are challenged to develop and disseminate educational objectives for the undergraduate medical education programme and to ensure their use as programme planning and assessment tools. Concerns over the level of faculty and student awareness of new educational objectives prompted our institution to develop a campaign to increase awareness and use of new objectives. Why the idea was necessary We employed traditional strategies for developing and disseminating our new educational objectives. We asked many faculty members to participate in their development; we asked all faculty to review and approve them; we discussed them with administration staff at meetings; we distributed them widely using electronic mail and posted them on the Office of Curriculum and Medical Education website. Despite these efforts, conversations among administrators, faculty and students raised concerns that many in our academic community remained unfamiliar with the new educational objectives document. What was done We utilised a longitudinal trend study to investigate the impact of a 24-week campaign designed to increase awareness and use of our institution's new educational objectives. This campaign contained 4 elements: listen to the institution; develop a theme that resonates; sweep people in, and build infrastructure. During the 24-week campaign, we listened to the institution's voice (i.e. discovered where innovation was already taking place in the organisation and who was behind it) by building on the creativity of faculty members who had drafted the educational objectives document. We developed a resonating theme by generating the SP2IC2ES mnemonic, with each letter representing 1 of 8 educational objective themes (Scientific foundations of clinical practice; Professionalism; Problem-solving and clinical decision making; Information management and critical thinking; Communication; Clinical skills; Economics of medicine and health care delivery systems, and Social, community, and cultural contexts of health). We swept people in by using PowerPoint presentations, electronic communications and poster displays, and we built a sustainable infrastructure by creating electronic icons for each SP2IC2ES theme. A 9-item questionnaire was administered to a convenience sample of faculty and students pre- and post-campaign. Data were analysed using spss. Pearson's chi-square was used to test for differences on dichotomous variables; the Mann–Whitney U-test was used for Likert scale variables. The null hypothesis was rejected for P < 0·05. Evaluation of results and impact The campaign produced a significant increase in student and faculty awareness of the educational objectives and the SP2IC2ES mnemonic. A total of 59% of faculty responders planned to use SP2IC2ES in their teaching, compared with 29% before the campaign (P = 0·001). The relationship between faculty who planned to use SP2IC2ES in teaching and faculty who reported that the campaign had had at least a moderate impact on their knowledge of the educational objectives was also significant. In conclusion, a campaign approach contributed to both increased awareness of a medical school's educational objectives and enhanced use.