HJAR Sep/Oct 2022

DIALOGUE 14 SEP / OCT 2022 I  HEALTHCARE JOURNAL OF ARKANSAS   At the end of the day, what really limits us is having enough faculty, facilities, and patient numbers to be able to adequately train and prepare the students. By having our campus in Northwest Arkansas, that expands our capacity and doesn’t take away from the experience here in Little Rock. The other thing that we started last year was a new three-year medical school curriculum. As you know, historically, medical school is a four-year program, and we now have a three-year track with a small number of students up in Northwest Arkansas. That is to accelerate the training into primary care residencies — another way to try to get more physicians trained more quickly. Editor So, there’s nothing holding you guys back from actually accepting more stu- dents and pulling more future physicians through the pipeline, other than you don’t have the facilities and the staff? Smyth Well, medical school education is tightly regulated by the LCME, and there are a whole series of standards and require- ments that have to be met; it’s not as simple as just doubling the medical school class. In order to maintain our accreditation, we have to be able to demonstrate to LCME that every student has an education that meets a whole series of criteria. We don’t really have the capacity to double the class. We can, as we did this year, increase the class size some, but we wouldn’t be able to offer a training experience that would meet the accreditation expectations. Editor This last decade has seen an increase in medical schools opening across the country, including the Alice L. Walton School of Medicine, poised to open soon in your backyard. How are these increased openings impacting established colleges like yours from a recruitment and resi- dency perspective? Smyth I’ll start by saying that UAMS accepts 7% of all of our applications, so we certainly feel as though we’re very selective in the students that are accepted and that there is a pool of students across the nation who would be qualified to attend medical school who may not be accepted. Within the con- text of what’s happening nationally, I cer- tainly think capacity to have new medical schools, to have schools open branch cam- puses is there. One of the things that is an interesting and relatively recent phenomena is that a lot of these newmedical schools are coming out of community hospitals. They’re not necessarily in the traditional academic medical center model, and I think they’re training students from more of a commu- nity hospital perspective. That is likely to be attractive to certain students, certain appli- cants, as well. Editor Has the UAMS curriculum moved toward more integration of conventional medicine with more holistic principles? Smyth Certainly, we’ve embraced for many years a patient-centered model of health- care, which really is one that centers around patients’ needs and preferences and brings a team-based approach to the entire care delivery, moving away from what’s easi- est for those of us delivering care to what makes the most sense from a patient per- spective in terms of how a patient receives care, preventive services, and other things that they may need. Within that thinking, we certainly embrace evidence-based care. I think that’s a basic tenet of academic medi- cine — that we’re here to provide care that is based on evidence with the understanding Susan Smyth, MD, PhD (right), discusses a project with Postdoctoral Fellow Desislava Marinkova Kaloyanov, PhD, at the bench in Smyth’s lab.