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TOBACCO PROGRAM ACCREDITED
The College of Medicine AHEC program is officially one of the country’s best in training experts who treat people for tobacco dependence. The program recently received national accreditation through the Association for the Treatment of Tobacco Use and Dependence for its course titled Tobacco Treatment Specialist Training: 3-Day Foundation.

“FSU AHEC is now one of only five programs in the nation that have achieved this accreditation,” said Andrée Aubrey (pictured here), Area Health Education Center program director at Florida State University. Included among the five is the Mayo Clinic Nicotine Dependence Center.

Aubrey said the course “was created with the goal of training the health-professions workforce and retaining tobacco contract dollars within Florida. Before this course was developed, the AHECs, rural hospitals and other tobacco-services providers were using out-of-state training programs.” She saluted the work of the FSU AHEC team: Mary Dailey, assistant AHEC director; Karen Geletko; Chenikka Usher; and Les Beitsch, M.D., J.D., associate dean for health affairs.


NEWS FROM HAVANA MIDDLE SCHOOL
The College of Medicine is part of a team that’s working to open a wellness center at Havana Middle School in August. “We decided to create a center where we have students from pharmacy, allied health, dental hygiene, nursing, physical therapy and medicine working together,” said Maggie Blackburn, M.D.

Get the details, including the long list of partners in this project.

 

AN IMPRESSIVE OUTING FOR THE GERIATRICS DEPARTMENT
The Department of Geriatrics made a strong showing in May at the annual meeting of the American Geriatrics Society. It had two posters accepted for the prestigious Presidential Poster session. One was “Benefits of the Wii Video Game in Geriatric Communities” (Class of 2013 student Mary O’Meara (pictured here), Lisa Granville, M.D., Suzanne Baker, Ceola Grant). O’Meara won Best Student Poster for the Quality of Life research section of the annual meeting. (Her work was supported by grants from the Reynolds Foundation and by a donation from the late Charles Mathews, M.D.) The other Presidential Poster was “ElderQuest: Video game fun with the AAMC competencies” (Alice Pomidor, M.D., Bill Pomidor, Granville, Ken Brummel-Smith, M.D., Baker).

Another College of Medicine student-and-faculty poster was accepted: “Developing Functional Assessment Skills Through Service Learning” (Donna Jacobi, M.D., Paul McLeod, M.D., and Class of 2010 alumni Stephenie Scully and Erin Golden). Jacobi, geriatrics clerkship director in Pensacola, presented two other posters: “Going Home Alone: Patient Characteristics in a Targeted Transitional Care Pilot” (with Cheryl Piling and Angel Kelly Shelby) and “Applying ABCs of Behavior Management to Nursing Home Quality Improvement.”

The faculty also presented in a number of workshops. Pomidor presented her work on “ElderQuest.” Granville developed, organized and presented two workshops: “Solving the Competency-Based Evaluation Mystery: A Workshop for Assessing Geriatrics Competencies for Students, Residents, and Fellows,” and “Competency Certification in Gait and Fall Risk Evaluation for Medical Students, Residents, and Other Health Care Practitioners.” Brummel-Smith was impressed by it all: “The College of Medicine’s innovative teaching and learning initiatives are receiving national attention, and interest is growing in our work in implementing competency-based evaluations.”


SPEAKING OF ‘ELDERQUEST’…
The “ElderQuest” project was featured prominently in the June issue of the AAMC Reporter. “Video Games as Medical Education Tools,” the article by Scott Harris, reported that “Medical schools around the country are creating video games with the expressed goal of improving medical education.”

Harris quoted Bryan Bergeron, M.D., a research affiliate with Harvard Medical School and MIT, saying that the games are “a way to get people excited. When you’re excited, your mind works better. Your synapses are firing more rapidly, and your brain is fully awake. In games, there is a sense of uncertainty. If you know what’s going to happen, there’s no harm in going to sleep. But with games, it’s different. You’re fully awake, and the information gets into your cortex.”

In “ElderQuest,” players must locate the Gray Sage and nurse the powerful but ailing wizard back to health. “Geriatrics is often overlooked and seen as difficult, or not overly glamorous,” Pomidor (pictured here) told Harris. “The students need to have something fun to do. If it’s fun, they’ll play it whether they want to learn or not. So far, they think the idea is really cool. We feel we need to do something for the millennial generation. They don’t read, they multitask, and they do everything online.”

(Watch for a feature article on “ElderQuest” in a future issue of FSU MED magazine.)


HIGH-SCHOOLERS SAMPLE MED SCHOOL
Sixty-one students from across Florida participated in one of three Summer Institute sessions at the College of Medicine. The weeklong sessions, for rising juniors and seniors, provide an inside look at what it means to be both a doctor and a medical student. It’s one way to encourage students from diverse backgrounds to consider a career in medicine.

“Our goal for the Summer Institute is to recruit students from rural, underserved and minority backgrounds and, at the same time, recruit students from other parts of Florida who have a desire to work in medically underserved areas,” said Thesla Berne-Anderson, director of college and pre-college outreach.

This summer, various community partners helped cover some of the students’ tuition. Capital Health Plan, for example, provided support for two students from Gadsden and Wakulla counties. In Collier County, the Immokalee Foundation supported three participants. And with an eye toward creating future physicians for Sarasota and Manatee counties, U.S. Rep. Vern Buchanan provided financial support for two participants from his area.

In the photo, Class of 2014 student Chris McDonald instructs a Summer Institute participant in the Clinical Skills and Simulation Center.

HELLO FROM HARVARD MACY
You might not think an 11-year-old medical school needs to think about change, but don’t say that around Myra Hurt. Even in this nearly new school, she says, people talk about “the way we’ve always done things.” Her fascination with finding a better way of educating medical students was the driving force behind this school’s creation – and some of her inspiration came from a 1999 Harvard Macy Institute session. Harvard Macy exists to help health-care educators worldwide discover how to lead organizational change.

Hurt has been back many times. But this spring it was a thrill for her to return with most of the College of Medicine’s leadership team. “For them to be sharing their ideas with people from all over the world, and picking up new ideas from people on the cutting edge of change – to have the College of Medicine right there in the mix – it was wonderful,” she said.

With this school's current emphasis on curriculum reform, the timing was perfect. Since their return, the medical school’s Harvard Macy alumni have formed a working group. The ideas keep percolating.

Front row, from left: Myra Hurt, Ph.D., senior associate dean for research and graduate programs; Nancy Hayes, Ph.D., director of clinical foundations; Alma Littles, M.D., senior associate dean for medical education and academic affairs; Richard Nowakowski, Ph.D., biomedical sciences chair; Ricardo Gonzalez-Rothi, M.D., clinical sciences chair. Second row, from left: John Fogarty, M.D., dean; Lisa Granville, M.D., geriatrics associate chair; Les Beitsch, M.D., J.D., health affairs director; Dan Van Durme, M.D., family medicine chair; and Ken Brummel-Smith, M.D., geriatrics chair.