Dean's Update
April 4, 2025 - Aron Sousa, MD
Friends,
Next week, we meet with the LCME for an interval visit following our 2023 regular visit. For nearly two years, our curriculum and student affairs teams within academic affairs have been working flat out on the elements identified by the LCME. They did a root cause analysis for each one (thank you, Assistant Dean for Accreditation and Program Evaluation Heather Laird-Fick!), set up a work group, created and implemented a plan, collected follow-up performance data and student satisfaction data on each one. Thanks to the collaboration of so many people in the college and university, as well as the intelligence, dedication, and grit of the folks in academic affairs, every issue has greatly improved. We think each one is “resolved” but only the LCME can say that, and we are sophisticated enough to know there will be some follow up after this visit.
I want to call out a few remarkable successes:
- For a long time, many of our students, particularly those in the preclerkship phase of the curriculum, have sought a simpler method to access research opportunities. This bedeviled me when I was the senior associate dean for academic affairs. Well, Senior Associate Dean for Academic Affairs Andrea Wendling, MD, has made a remarkable difference. She has made better use of graduate school and internal funding to support faculty research mentors, and the team in Dr. Parameswaran’s research office has worked with Dr. Wending and, importantly, the departmental chairs, to support faculty working as mentors. No system is perfect, and I know there are still matches that need to be made or students who need to engage with more vim, but this is so much better. Importantly, the student ratings are way up over a couple of years ago. The improvement is due to the work of many and the vision of Dr. Wendling. My thanks to everyone working on this project!
- Around the time of the last site visit, there were real troubles with financial aid. Due to problems with vendor software, the university did not get loans correctly out to some students. While much of this was due to the external vendor, our students did not have a good experience and made it clear in their independent student analysis. Over the last couple of years, the university financial aid team has made great strides, and the college added a person who specifically helps students navigate financial aid. Happily, the students recognize the difference. This improvement has been the result of the university’s financial aid and the college’s student affairs working together as one team. Often that work is done when the rest of us are on break between semesters – my thanks to university financial aid and the college’s student affairs team, led by Associate Dean for Student Affairs Wanda Lipscomb, PhD, for this remarkable turnaround.
- Our groundbreaking Shared Discovery Curriculum (SDC) is bold and has many structures new to the university. To help our students along the path, our basic science faculty and the SDC team have implemented new basic science content, structures, and assessments to help our students develop their basic science fundamentals in our highly integrated curriculum. These changes have been guided by the counsel of our M2, M3, and M4 students. This has been a very large lift that we believe is making an important difference for our students. My deep thanks to the basic science chairs, the basic science faculty, and the SDC team, led by Associate Dean for Undergraduate Medical Education Robin DeMuth, MD, for these remarkable improvements.
- The college has long placed an emphasis on career counseling and preparation for students entering the Match. To address LCME concerns, we’ve gone back to reimagine this curriculum and the resources we give to the students. Our program is now led by Kelly Armstrong, MD (’10) and Deana Wilbanks, EdD (’20) with the most remarkable support of our community assistant deans, the student programs administrators in the communities, and the chairs of our clinical departments. You know our students had an excellent Match this year, and the work of this remarkable team will continue to improve career planning and preparation for years to come.
- Improving the learning experience for students is an issue across the country. This is all the more complex because we have a diversity of clinical sites across the state. Jennifer Edwards-Johnson, MPH, DO, our associate dean for community academic programs, and Sean Valles, PhD, chair of the learning environment committee, have designed a central reporting system for student mistreatment and an oversight committee to address student concerns, identify patterns, and design educational interventions. Students and faculty have been using the system, the team has provided training to many groups across the college, and most importantly, we have seen a decrease in the incidence of mistreatment on our Y2Q (end of 2nd year) and graduation surveys.
- Health and wellness have seen significant improvement through a dedicated team. This is an important part of our community-based school, with students located across the state. Karen Stanley-Kime, PhD, the assistant dean for student wellness and engagement, along with the assistant directors of student counseling and wellness, community assistant deans, and student program administrators, have worked together to improve access to health services, personal counseling, and overall student wellness activities across the system.
If you are meeting with the LCME Monday and Tuesday, and many of you are, I want you to go in with confidence. We’ve done excellent work in the last two years, and we should be proud of the analyses we have done, programming we have achieved, and improvements we demonstrate. This team has been just astonishing in its accomplishments. I start off the visit on Monday morning, and I will go into my meeting with confidence and enjoy the remarkable work and improvements our team has already demonstrated. My thanks to Lisa Galbavi for heading up the organization of the materials and the visit and to everyone who has done this amazing work!
Serving the people with you,
Aron
Aron Sousa, MD, FACP
Dean, Michigan State University College of Human Medicine