Medical school dean talks student mistreatment, research funding

The University of Missouri’s School of Medicine has a new action plan its dean feels will help put them in the good graces of national accreditation.

Dr. Patrick Delafontaine met with the University of Missouri Board of Curators Thursday afternoon at University Hospital. Among presentations regarding MU Health’s finances and future plans, Delafontaine updated the board on the school’s progress in different areas.

ABC 17 News reported in September when the Liaison Committee on Medical Education said MU was out of compliance on four of 95 categories. Among those was diversity in its student body and student mistreatment. The committee will return in 2018 for an audit of the school to discuss accreditation.

Dr. Delafontaine said it submitted its action plan to the LCME Wednesday, detailing how it will improve. The incoming medical student class “is among most diverse,” Delafontaine said, with 27 percent of the class identifying as an ethnic minority. The school took the most applications in its history this year, and Dr. Laine Young-Walker was tapped recently to help improve diversity rates as assistant dean of student programs.

But as the school entertains a record amount of applicants, that office will also tackle reports of student mistreatment, which Delafontaine said double the national average. The school recently launched a committee for students to report mistreatment anonymously, called CiRCLE, which will investigate the reports and try to “close the loop” of mistreatment.

“We’re encouraging reporting on any situation where a student would feel humiliated or embarrassed,” Delafontaine told ABC 17 News.

Mistreatment is not an easy definition, however. Students answer a questionnaire, Delafontaine said, that asks if they’ve ever been “humiliated” by anyone at the school, which he calls a “very open-ended question.” A National Institute of Health study done at UCLA from 1996 to 2008 found persisting incidents of “physical, verbal, sexual harassment, ethnic, and power mistreatment,” mainly coming from clinical staff and residents, with more than half of the nearly 2,000 that participated reporting mistreatment. Delafontaine said a student may consider not knowing a staff member’s question during medical rounds as “humiliating.”

“It’s not necessarily one definition,” Delafontaine said. “So a real conversation needs to be had with the students, how do we define this. But, of course, it’s there answer is what counts. It’s the way they feel. We need to correct that. It’s unacceptable that we have a rate that is higher than the average.”

The work on student mistreatment comes as the school of medicine focuses on increasing national research grant funding, an important metric in improving MU’s ranking in the American Association of Universities. The School of Medicine contributes nearly a quarter of all of the school’s research money, which campus-wide took a nearly $24 million dollar dip from 2010 to 2016.

Delafontaine said the competitiveness to secure that money has increased while the NIH’s funding has decreased. In response, the school hired three new department heads – Drs. Kevin Staveley-O’Carroll in surgery and to direct the Ellis Fischel Cancer Center, Talissa Altes to lead Radiology and Edward Yeh to head oncology – with significant research backgrounds.

“They’ve got a strong record of research in their respective areas of specialty, and that is a very important step in growing the academic mission of the health system.”