Promoting faculty professionalism: a case-based approach.

INTRODUCTION: Professionalism is a key attribute for health professionals. Yet, it is unknown how much faculty development is directed toward skills and behaviours of faculty professionalism. Faculty professionalism includes boundaries in teacher-student relationships, self-reflection, assuring one's own fitness for duty, and maintaining confidentiality when appropriate. METHODS: For five years, we have incorporated faculty professionalism as a routine agenda item for the monthly Physician Assistant Programme faculty meetings, allowing faculty members to introduce issues they are comfortable sharing or have questions about. We also have case discussions of faculty professionalism within faculty meetings every three months. RESULTS: Faculty professionalism is important in the daily work lives of faculty members and including this as part of routine agendas verifies its importance. A faculty survey showed that a majority look forward to the quarterly faculty professionalism case discussions. These have included attempted influence in the admissions process, student/faculty social boundaries, civic professionalism, students requesting medical advice, and self-disclosure. CONCLUSION: A preventive approach works better than a reactionary approach to faculty missteps in professionalism. Routine discussion of faculty professionalism normalizes the topic and is helpful to both new and experienced faculty members. We recommend incorporation of faculty professionalism as a regular agenda item in faculty meetings.

Identifying Barriers and Practical Solutions to Conducting Site-Based Research in North America: Exploring Acute Heart Failure Trials As a Case Study.

Although the prognosis of ambulatory heart failure (HF) has improved dramatically there have been few advances in the management of acute HF (AHF). Despite regional differences in patient characteristics, background therapy, and event rates, AHF clinical trial enrollment has transitioned from North America and Western Europe to Eastern Europe, South America, and Asia-Pacific where regulatory burden and cost of conducting research may be less prohibitive. It is unclear if the results of clinical trials conducted outside of North America are generalizable to US patient populations. This article uses AHF as a paradigm and identifies barriers and practical solutions to successfully conducting site-based research in North America.

Risk Prediction for Epithelial Ovarian Cancer in 11 United States-Based Case-Control Studies: Incorporation of Epidemiologic Risk Factors and 17 Confirmed Genetic Loci.

Previously developed models for predicting absolute risk of invasive epithelial ovarian cancer have included a limited number of risk factors and have had low discriminatory power (area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUC) < 0.60). Because of this, we developed and internally validated a relative risk prediction model that incorporates 17 established epidemiologic risk factors and 17 genome-wide significant single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) using data from 11 case-control studies in the United States (5,793 cases; 9,512 controls) from the Ovarian Cancer Association Consortium (data accrued from 1992 to 2010). We developed a hierarchical logistic regression model for predicting case-control status that included imputation of missing data. We randomly divided the data into an 80% training sample and used the remaining 20% for model evaluation. The AUC for the full model was 0.664. A reduced model without SNPs performed similarly (AUC = 0.649). Both models performed better than a baseline model that included age and study site only (AUC = 0.563). The best predictive power was obtained in the full model among women younger than 50 years of age (AUC = 0.714); however, the addition of SNPs increased the AUC the most for women older than 50 years of age (AUC = 0.638 vs. 0.616). Adapting this improved model to estimate absolute risk and evaluating it in prospective data sets is warranted.