Remediation in an Integrated Medical School Curriculum ‐ Lessons Learned

Medical schools are finding that curricular reform and adoption of integrated curricular designs are expected by their accrediting bodies. From a faculty perspective, curricular reform can be a relatively traumatic event that is often mandated but rarely embraced. Faculty members’ immediate concern is typically the conservation or pruning of content as it moves from well‐defined disciplines (e.g. anatomy, pharmacology, pathology) to a novel place in more obscure categories such as back pain, nausea, fever, etc. In addition to re‐ordering the content, a task that is akin to assembling a new picture from an existing jigsaw puzzle, there are often expectations that more topics will be delivered outside of lecture. Inclusion of team‐based sessions, application exercises, or via flipped‐classroom sessions bring additional challenges to teaching faculty. In the process of implementing a new curricular scheme, some important aspects are only considered after the content has been put into place. One of these concerns is how to remediate students after a course failure. This session will focus on how remediation can be conducted in a longitudinal curriculum by showcasing the challenges that were identified and addressed at the West Virginia School of Osteopathic Medicine. WVSOM adopted a longitudinal, patient‐presentation curriculum starting in the 2012–13 academic year. We found that the previous remediation process and resources were inadequate to meet the needs of remediating students in the new curricular arrangement. We also discovered that sensible and seemingly‐minor changes made during the academic year sometimes had unintended consequences for remediation. This session will show how deficiencies in the remediation process were identified, how they were remedied, and will finish by presenting our revised remediation process. Remediation is intended to strengthen the curriculum by maintaining high standards of our students and they work through content that challenged them on the first attempt. The revised remediation process at WVSOM accomplishes these goals by limiting the number of courses that can be remediated, provides resources to the students that are commensurate with the way content had been delivered during their regular courses, gives them opportunities to diagnose weaknesses in their learning, and then address those weaknesses through Q&A sessions with the teaching faculty. Support or Funding Information No extramural or other grant funding was used during preparation of this session. The presenter has no conflicts of interest to report.