DEAN’S LETTER
New Beginnings My column in the last issue of North Dakota Medicine largely consisted of a review of what the School accomplished during the just-completed 2014–15 academic year. And it was a long list. But recently compiled financial data have become available that permit me to brag (on behalf of our faculty) about one more milestone achieved—our sponsored funding for research and related activities for 2014–2015 was some $27.5 million, constituting our most productive year ever. And while grant support doesn’t really measure the more important effect that a given body of research work can have on society, it does show just how hard—and effectively—our research faculty are working. Because most of the funding is peer-reviewed and highly competitive, it really says something about how members of the UND SMHS faculty are viewed by their peers around the country and around the world. So congratulations to all the investigators who are working hard to improve the lives of the people of North Dakota through new discoveries. But with the start of the 2015–16 academic year, it’s time to also look forward. And the most noteworthy new development is the effect of the expanded class sizes thanks to the Healthcare Workforce Initiative (HWI). Seventy-nine medical students joined the medical profession on August 3, their first day of medical school and the largest first-year medical student class in the history of UND. Similar class expansions have occurred in the health sciences, and many of those students now are on campus as well. Overall, our class sizes have increased around 25 percent. And we’ve added a variety of new residency (post-MD training) slots as well, thanks to the HWI and very generous funding from the North Dakota Legislature. Recently added residency positions will be available in psychiatry, geriatrics, and family medicine, with the family medicine program in Fargo 4
NORTH DAKOTA MEDICINE Fall 2015
to be restarted after it was decommissioned over a decade ago. To house all those additional students, the new SMHS building in Grand Forks is coming along nicely. It is scheduled to be completed by May 15, 2016, with occupancy scheduled for July 15—just in time for the incoming medical school Class of 2020. We hope to hold an open house and official opening ceremony in late September 2016. But for now, we are busy planning the transition into the new facility. Part of the planning involves the physical move, but we’re spending much more time anticipating and planning how the various departments and programs will actually utilize the building from an operational standpoint. Another big upcoming event is the revisit by a team from the Liaison Committee on Medical Education (LCME) during mid-October as part of the SMHS’s reaccreditation process. As you may recall, the LCME has required us to address a variety of issues where they found us to be in less than complete compliance with ten of their 131 standards. The faculty and staff have worked hard to address each and every one of the citations, and we believe that we’ve adequately addressed them all.