By Nicholas Roznovsky
Projects spearheaded by two UC San Francisco Department of Psychiatry faculty members were among those selected to receive an Education Innovations Funding grant, designed to support projects which can make significant contributions to educational excellence at UCSF.
Diversity and inclusion training for faculty
Associate Clinical Professor of Psychiatry Élida M. Bautista, PhD, proposed a series of four workshops to enhance faculty capacity to teach the diverse student body at UCSF. The workshops will draw on competencies for teaching faculty as identified by the School of Medicine's Differences Matter initative, and train faculty developers to deliver these through the UCSF Center for Faculty Educators “Teach for UCSF Certificate Program.”
Course objectives will include examining unconscious bias, understanding power and privilege in intersecting identities, recognizing and addressing microaggressions, and decreasing the presence of stereotype threat. The series will provide faculty with tools for increasing their self-awareness, actively working to reduce bias, and translating these skills to create a more inclusive climate for learners.
Joining Bautista in submitting the proposal were Holly Nishimura and Pat O’Sullivan, EdD, of the UCSF Center for Faculty Educators; Elizabeth Wilson, MD, MPH, from the UCSF School of Medicine; Denise L. Davis, MD, FAACH, of the Faculty Development Center of Excellence in Primary Care Education; and Alejandra Rincon, PhD, from the Office of Diversity and Outreach.
Training interprofessional learners in motivational interviewing
Assistant Clinical Professor of Psychiatry and San Francisco VA Health Care System staff psychologist Jennifer Manuel, PhD, successfully submitted a proposal to test the feasibility and effectiveness of an innovative interprofessional motivational interviewing (MI) curriculum that includes both feedback and coaching.
MI has been widely studied in medical and mental health settings, and has a strong evidence base for enhancing engagement in a variety of behaviors including dietary changes, exercise, medication adherence, smoking cessation, and managing substance use. Given the increasing evidence showing the effectiveness of MI, researchers have examined ways of training clinicians in this approach.
Studies indicate that workshop training is the most frequent method of training clinicians in MI, but the approach has been shown to be insufficient in creating longstanding change in clinicians’ MI skills. If the MI curriculum developed by Manuel's group is effective, it will be developed into an MI training and coaching toolkit that can be disseminated to other interprofessional training programs.
Additional team members on Manuel's submission were Bridget O’Brien PhD, and Rebecca Shunk, MD, from the UCSF Department of Medicine; and Anna Strewler, NP, from the UCSF School of Nursing's Department of Community Health Systems.
Nearly $240,000 awarded in total
The grants were sponsored by the UCSF Haile T. Debas Academy of Medical Educators, in collaboration with the UCSF Program for Interprofessional Practice and Education and the UCSF Library. Overall, the consortium selected 16 proposals totaling $239,230 to receive funding for the 2017-2018 academic year.
The Academy’s Innovations Funding program, open to all UCSF faculty, provides intramural grants for the development of new curricular programs and promotion of constructive curricular change. Since the program's inception, the Academy has awarded more than $2.75 million to more than 150 projects.
The UCSF Library and the Program for Interprofessional Practice and Education have collaborated to support interprofessional education projects since 2009. During this period they have funded nearly 40 projects for over $500,000.
Due to the unprecedented strong field of proposals, additional funding for this round of grants was also provided by the UCSF Office of Medical Education, the UCSF Academic Senate, and Tideswell™ at UCSF.
About UCSF Psychiatry
The UCSF Department of Psychiatry and the Langley Porter Psychiatric Institute are among the nation's foremost resources in the fields of child, adolescent, adult, and geriatric mental health. Together they constitute one of the largest departments in the UCSF School of Medicine and the UCSF Weill Institute for Neurosciences, with a mission focused on research (basic, translational, clinical), teaching, patient care and public service.
UCSF Psychiatry conducts its clinical, educational and research efforts at a variety of locations in Northern California, including UCSF campuses at Parnassus Heights, Mission Bay and Laurel Heights, UCSF Medical Center, UCSF Benioff Children's Hospitals, Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital and Trauma Center, the San Francisco VA Health Care System and UCSF Fresno.
About the UCSF Weill Institute for Neurosciences
The UCSF Weill Institute for Neurosciences, established by the extraordinary generosity of Joan and Sanford I. "Sandy" Weill, brings together world-class researchers with top-ranked physicians to solve some of the most complex challenges in the human brain.
The UCSF Weill Institute leverages UCSF’s unrivaled bench-to-bedside excellence in the neurosciences. It unites three UCSF departments—Neurology, Psychiatry, and Neurological Surgery—that are highly esteemed for both patient care and research, as well as the Neuroscience Graduate Program, a cross-disciplinary alliance of nearly 100 UCSF faculty members from 15 basic-science departments, as well as the UCSF Institute for Neurodegenerative Diseases, a multidisciplinary research center focused on finding effective treatments for Alzheimer’s disease, frontotemporal dementia, Parkinson’s disease, and other neurodegenerative disorders.
About UCSF
UC San Francisco (UCSF) is a leading university dedicated to promoting health worldwide through advanced biomedical research, graduate-level education in the life sciences and health professions, and excellence in patient care. It includes top-ranked graduate schools of dentistry, medicine, nursing and pharmacy; a graduate division with nationally renowned programs in basic, biomedical, translational and population sciences; and a preeminent biomedical research enterprise. It also includes UCSF Health, which comprises top-ranked hospitals – UCSF Medical Center and UCSF Benioff Children’s Hospitals in San Francisco and Oakland – and other partner and affiliated hospitals and healthcare providers throughout the Bay Area.
