Facilitating and Impeding Factors for Promotion of Educational Planning in Young Medical Schools

Abstract

Purpose: This study aims to identify the impeding and facilitating factors in educational planning of the young Korean medical schools and to develop the rationales for recommendation. Methods: The young medical school was defined as the one established during the last ten years producing the graduates no more than 5 consecutive years. The force field analysis technic was applied to collect the factors influencing to the desirable direction of the educational planning in areas of the organization, students, faculty members, physical setup, and educational planning of such young medical schools. Results: A total of ten medical schools were categorized as the young school, comprising 24% of all 41 medical schools in Korea. These ten schools included 2 national and 8 private schools, and the latter has run 3 non-university-based MD programs. With a few exceptions, their MD programs did not show any crucial diversities or justifiable differences from another 12 schools which were established one decade ahead the study schools. Although most of fundamental controversies seemed derived from loss of active faculty participation in educational planning aside from a weak perception on faculty’s academic roles/identity in the university community, the worst educational confusion was related to copying of the curricular format from the traditional medical schools, mostly the alma maters of the first deans at the time of school establishment. Further to the above were wide dissociation of school’s curricular design from their long term goals or community’s medical practice, no intimate integration between the curricular designs and dean’s limited leadership, and shortage of faculty members in basic medical sciences. On the other hand, a unique advantage among ten young schools was the enrollment of 40~50 students per year with a relatively high proportion of young faculty members who were more renovation-minded against the traditional curricular barrier. Conclusion: Regardless of administrative system of university or solely medical school program setting, the followings were stressed for further effective educational renovation in the following priorities; ① strengthening of educational unit to meet faculty’s pedagogical upgrading, ② recognition of individual learners with activation of small group learning, ③ application of strict evaluation criteria for faculty recruitment and promotion, ④ dean’s leadership expressed by appropriate appointment policy of department chairs, and ⑤ arrangement of intercollegiate collaboration among young medical schools. It is also recommended that seeding and harvest policy would not be necessarily monopolized by the same dean, and instead it should be consecutively succeeded for better renovative outcomes.