The Group on Ethics and Humanities successfully secured STFM Group Project Funding to conduct a "Survey of Medical Ethics Education in Family Medicine Residency Programs." Helen Manson, MBChB, MRCGP (PI) and David Satin, MD (Co-PI) will be collaborating across the pond (Dr Manson currently works and lives in Dundee, Scotland) to survey all of the US family medicine residency programs' ethics curricula, to better understand the state of ethics education and the needs of our programs. At this year's annual meeting in Vancouver, we will conduct a faculty development seminar, "Clinical Ethics Skills for Residency Faculty," focusing on patient decision-making capacity and the process of informed consent.
 

The Group on Family-centered Maternity Care developed an online resource on the STFM Resource Library (FMDRL) of Away Maternity Elective Sites, and a letter was written and sent to the STFM president stating the groups’ stance on residency education pertaining to maternity care. 
 
This year the Group on Family in Family Medicine was involved in a wonderfully successful collaboration with the Group on Behavioral Science. Cochairs of the two groups submitted a proposal for a 1-year Behavioral Science Educator's Fellowship to the STFM Board. The fellowship concept received excellent support and was endorsed by the Board. Then, in February, the fellowship was awarded an STFM Foundation Group Project Grant to help partially cover expenses for the fellows. We're very excited to begin this faculty support and development activity in Vancouver at the Annual Spring Conference. Eliana Korin, DiplPsic; Nancy Newman, MD; and Amy Odom, DO, have been working on a survey of residency programs  to assess the state of affairs in family systems training. We expect the information from the survey will help inform future curriculum and faculty development needs. We also look forward to presentations from our colleagues in the Behavioral Science/Family Systems track at the annual meeting.


In 2008–2009, the Group on Family Medicine Pipeline continued to promote the Future Family Docs Campaign by (1) developing sample posters for the family medicine office in collaboration with the National AHEC to promote family medicine as a career, (2) launching and holding a photo contest to submit the best photo for the poster permanently, and (3) developing a slide show to inform student shadowers about professionalism and the need for patient privacy—which is designed to satisfy current HIPPA regulations for such activities—and obtain AAFP support. These three activities are the latest installment to the  Pipeline Kit to Boost Student Interest in Family Medicine, which was presented at the 2009 STFM annual meeting. The group presents another session at this 2010 meeting in Vancouver, titled “One Minute Recruitment Visit.” The results of the poster contest, with submissions from residency programs around the country, will be announced and displayed at the Vancouver meeting. Collaboration with the National AHEC and AAFP on these projects continues to be strengthened.
    
The Group on Global Health (1) developed a track guiding attendees of the 2010 STFM Annual Spring Conference to global health-oriented presentations and posters, (2) presented the 2009 Gabriel Smilkstein award, honoring lifetime achievements in promoting global health, to Raymond Downing and Janice Armstrong, and (3) submitted a research proposal to the STFM Foundation Group Project Fund. Although our proposal was not selected to receive funding, we look forward to resubmitting next year.

 
The Group on Medical Student Education is led by an elected Steering Committee. In 2009 they developed their mission statement: to oversee, coordinate, and support the activities of the Group on Medical Student Education and serve as a resource to STFM on medical student issues. In this past year, the Steering Committee structure was revised. Three members will be elected each year and will serve a term of 3 years. Additional individuals will be asked to join the Steering Committee on an ad hoc basis. The Steering Committee established three workgroups to address the three parts of its mission: (1) The communications workgroup implemented an open process to elicit interest for the NBME advisory committee, vetted nominees, and submitted the list to STFM, (2) The survey workgroup was instrumental in implementing the rapid cycle survey method recently adopted by the STFM Board and administered a survey from ACE about student use of the EMR. They continue to work with STFM and AAFP to create a national list of current family medicine clerkship directors. The scholarship workgroup contributed to the Journal Watch feature for the journal Teaching and Learning in Medicine. They reviewed and summarized articles published in the family medicine literature in the past year relevant to educators in other disciplines.

The past year has been a productive and exciting year for the Group on Online Cases. With most of the 29 cases completed, fmCASES were offered for pilot testing in July 2009. They were piloted by 119 institutions, 1,401 students have accessed the cases, 9,149 sessions started, and 7,914 sessions completed. Cases were highly rated by the students.These virtual patient cases were carefully designed and collaboratively developed by STFM members to teach the family medicine curriculum. Each case was reviewed by two or more peer reviewers. A summary of the key teaching points was available at the end of case. The cases are being revised and finalized based on students’ and peer reviewers’ feedback. A bank of 300 NBME-style exam questions is being developed based on the content of the cases. Along with the exam, the fmCASES will be available by subscription in July 2010. We are pleased to report that the 2009 STFM President’s Award was presented to the fmCASES project leaders at the 2009 STFM Annual Conference.



 
The Group on Oral Health updated its modules and resources, all available on the Web site www.smilesforlife2.org/. Downloads continue at a furious pace—currently more than 90,000—with a broad range of groups using the material. The group received a significant grant from the Dentaquest Foundation (www.oralhealthfoundation.org/) to take the seven core modules and develop them into online learning modules and update our Web site. A demonstration will be available at the STFM annual meeting in May 2010. The group continues to present the curricula in variety of settings, and we are pursuing increased awareness and incorporation in undergraduate medical education. A recent survey of US medical schools done by our group shows that only 56% of schools were aware that oral health questions are on the USLME Boards, and only 60% were aware of the AAMC's Medical School Objectives Project document on the importance of oral health in the medical school curriculum.
 
The Group on Pain Management and Palliative Care is supporting and leading a preconference workshop, “Palliative Care Training for Family Medicine Faculty: A Train-the-Trainer Workshop” at the Annual Spring Conference on Saturday, April 24, 2010.
 
The Group on the Patient-centered Medical Home (PCMH) has teams working on the development of a wiki for family medicine educators seeking the competencies necessary for the PCMH and a proposal to Family Medicine for a dedicated issue on the PCMH.
 
The Group on Pharmacotherapy submitted proposed revisions to the ACGME requirements specifically delineating the role of pharmacotherapy education and medication safety in training. The proposal is currently under review by the STFM leadership.
 

Group on Physician-Patient Interaction accomplishments included (1) member John Reiss, PhD, from the Institute for Child Health Policy at the University of Florida led a roundtable discussion at the 2010 Predoctoral Education Conference on the topic "A Learner-centered Approach to Communications Skills Training." The goal of this session was to inform participants about a learner-centered approach to teaching communications and relationship-building skills to medical students and to seek participation of other medical schools in a study of the utility of this strategy. This strategy involves having students (learners) identifying how they would like their patients to perceive them (as a provider). For example, a learner might want their patients to perceive them as "easy to talk to," "knowledgeable," and "reassuring." A video of a learner-patient interaction was then analyzed in terms of what the learners did to have the patient perceive the learner in the ways desired (eg, reassuring) and what the student did that might interfere with the patient perceiving the learner in the ways that he/she wanted. (2) Tom Egnew, EdD, published an article on medical trainee perceptions of their education about suffering in the Journal of Palliative Medicine (Egnew TR, Schaad DC. Medical trainee perceptions of medical school education about suffering: a pilot study. J Palliat Med 2009;12(10):929-35.) Dr Egnew is planning to do an expansion of this study, aimed specifically at current medical students (the study cohort in the prior study was residents) across a number of medical schools. He plans to do this as a short electronic survey (seven questions), which could expand on the data collected in the pilot study. He has enlisted collaborators from Penn State, University of Pittsburgh, Boston University, Tufts University, and the University of Alabama. (3) Several members of the Group on Physician-Patient Interaction presented “Dissemination of a Novel Fourth-year Medical Student Communications Elective: (POVE) Perspectives From Five Medical Schools” at the 2010 Predoctoral Education Conference in Jacksonville, FL. Information on this project is available from Larry Mauksch, MEd, the POVE project director, a senior lecturer and behavioral scientist in the Department of Family Medicine, University of Washington.
 
The Group on Senior Faculty will have its first official meeting at this year's Annual Spring Conference in Vancouver. Please plan on attending! A manuscript, detailing the results of a group survey in 2008, was accepted as a Letter to the Editor in Family Medicine. One task scheduled for our spring meeting is to review the survey and plan for a follow-up, addressing issues raised by the editors of Family Medicine and Academic Medicine, where a full-length article had been submitted, addressing issues of senior faculty.
 
The Group on Spirituality completed its project on developing Core Competencies in Spiritual Care for family medicine resident education. We also published the first issue of an electronic newsletter, “Spirituality Connection,” as a forum for sharing ideas and resources for curriculum development. We are beginning to build a library of curricula resources in the STFM Resource Library (FMDRL) and encourage STFM members to contribute useful resources to this library.
 
The Group on Student-run Free Clinics has had a successful first year of existence. We are partnered with the Society of Student-run Free Clinics (SSRFC), which is an international group of students and faculty working together to promote student-run free clinics throughout the world. This past year the STFM group faculty worked with students to put on two successful conferences: “Sharing the Vision” in Omaha, NE in March 2009 and another highly successful conference at the STFM Predoctoral Education Conference in Jacksonville, FL in January 2010. The full-day conference on January 30, 2009, in Jacksonville had more than 200 attendees, which boosted the number of people attending the STFM Predoctoral Education Conference this year. This was the third year that the SSRFC partnered with us to meet together during Predoc. This year we had students from China, Australia, and Canada. We had faculty and students from more than 29 medical schools throughout our country. The quality of the presentations, workshops, and posters was excellent. One specific workshop dedicated to the faculty within our group was well attended. We had time to share our ideas and experiences as advisors for student-run clinics. The leadership from our group worked directly with the leadership of the student group. The students are committed to having their next major annual conference be part of our next Predoctoral Education Conference in Houston during January 2011. New student leaders were elected and include:

National Coordinator—Chris Brown; Conference Directors—Tiffany Herrera, Autumn Atkinson, Julie Turner; Publicity and Clinic Recruitment—Lauren Johnston and Rachele Degraff; Newsletter Editors—Suzanne McCluskey and Nghi Lam; Resource Development/Advocacy—Emily Fletcher, Elizabeth Whitehead, Inna Sosinksy; Information Technology—Adam Mecca. We will continue to work for social justice in health care as we help provide needed health care to the underserved.

This photo was taken January 22, 2009, the day the Group on Student-run Free Clinics was founded.

 

Seven medical students from China attended the STFM Predoctoral Education Conference to learn how to start a student-run free clinic. Here, they pose with Richard Usatine, MD, one of the faculty advisors to the Society of Student-run Free Clinics.

The Group on Violence Education and Prevention received a STFM Group Project Fund Grant. Their project is “Current Trends in Medical Education in Identifying and Treating Patients Exposed to Domestic Violence.” The specific aims of this project will be to survey family medicine departments with regard to the training of faculty, residents, and medical students in the assessment of risks for abuse, neglect, and family and community violence within the framework of ACGME and RRC guidelines. This study will provide a snapshot of current education efforts and allow comparison with two previous national surveys of violence education in residencies.