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DEAN’S LETTER
Building on
After the close of 2012, I thought it would
be instructive to look back at what we
accomplished this past year, and look ahead
to what we have on tap for 2013. It is always
useful to compare goals with achievements,
and so I’ve looked back to my January 6,
2012, E-News column to see what
expectations I set for the School for 2012.
In that column, I outlined goals regarding
people, programs, and facilities. For people
at the School, I had hoped that we would
have filled all four of the then-vacant senior
leadership positions at the School—associate
dean for Student Affairs and Admissions,
founding chair of the basic sciences
department, founding director of the
Master of Public Health (MPH) Program,
and the Dr. Eva Gilbertson Chair of
Geriatrics. So the School (and I!) get a
mixed grade on this one—we’ve recruited
Dr. Joy Dorscher, an outstanding associate
dean for Student Affairs and Admissions,
and Dr. Raymond Goldsteen, an equally
outstanding director of the MPH Program.
On the other hand, the searches for the other
two positions are ongoing, albeit (hopefully!)
near their successful culmination.
Conversely, I think our grade on the
programs agenda is unequivocally positive.
The MPH program is off to a great start,
with 27 students currently enrolled, and
plans in place for class size expansion this
year as student interest in the program grows.
The integrated longitudinal clerkship for
third-year medical students on the
Northwest (Minot) campus also is off to a
great start. The MILE program (Minot
Integrated Longitudinal Experience)
emphasizes cross-discipline learning and
patient care. MILE is one of the ways in
which we will be able to accommodate an
expansion in class size, which incidentally
also is off to a great start. Eight additional
medical and 15 additional health sciences
students started this past summer, and the
additional residency slots funded by the
North Dakota Legislature are being filled
by grateful students.
Other programmatic issues that I
stressed a year ago included preparations
for our medical school reaccreditation visit
that is scheduled for March 2014, and
preparations for the North Dakota
Legislative Assembly beginning this month.
Medical schools are accredited by the
Liaison Committee on Medical Education
(LCME), and the School sponsored an
LCME Reaccreditation Kickoff Event on
November 26–27, during which we were
pleased to welcome the LCME Secretaries
to our campus. And for the upcoming
Legislature, we have completed a Facility
Space Study that concluded that the School
needs additional facility space, especially if
we are to continue our class size expansion
in support of enlarging the health care
workforce in North Dakota. There has been
strong support for full implementation of
the Health Care Workforce Initiative
(HWI), which calls for additional
expansion of the health provider education
pipeline. The HWI has been included in
Governor Dalrymple’s Executive Budget,
as has funding for a major addition to the
current physical plant of the School. The
Executive Budget will be presented to and
considered by the upcoming Legislature.
4 NORTH DAKOTA MEDICINE Holiday 2012