This first step in bringing the deans to reach a consensus served to
stimulate them to become better informed about the Texas Cancer Plan and to
gather basic data about cancer instruction at their schools, where and in what courses it
was taught, and who did the teaching. The telephone interview allowed the deans to express
directly their findings, concerns, and priorities.
Personal interviews: To understand how the deans in this group viewed the
issue and to identify and neutralize any areas of disagreement, personal
interviews were conducted with the deans from April 10 through May 2. These interviews
covered the background of the Legislative Task Force on Cancer and the Texas Cancer
Council, the results of the telephone interviews, and the agenda for the forthcoming
consensus conference. All deans were asked if they wished to bring another representative,
usually the faculty "expert," from their campuses to the conference. Consensus
conference: The final phase in this consensus-building process was a conference held June
19-20, 1990 in Austin. Every medical school in Texas was represented along with 3
representatives from the Texas Cancer Council. The Executive Director of the Texas Cancer
Council presented an update on its activities and future directions. Then, the conference
attendees broke into small groups that used the nominal group process, a technique to
identify and rank issues, to establish issues and priorities for the conference agenda, to
determine the expectations of the Texas Cancer Council for the medical schools and the
expectations of the medical schools for the Council, and to identify and assign priorities
for the goals of the Plan that were appropriate for medical schools to address.
Next, the group discussed how the
medical schools could best approach those goals. Issues considered included
the structure of the various curricula, the need for faculty support and development, the
lack of data about the effectiveness of current cancer instruction, and the general
problem of how to fund cancer education. Recognizing that the current situation in cancer
instruction at medical schools allowed for numerous duplications of instruction and some
major omissions, the group agreed that to introduce any changes in cancer instruction at
the medical schools required documentation of the deficiencies in outcomes of current
methods. The prevailing interest in mounting a unified action in cancer education was
focused entirely on prevention, screening, and early detection [13]. The
challenge, then, was to enlist the support of the curricular deans and faculties. The best
way seemed to be to demonstrate the need for this action by showing what students did and
did not know.
The group decided unanimously
that assessing the effectiveness of current efforts to educate medical students in Texas
about cancer prevention and screening should be the first step. Toward this
end, the group requested that the Texas Cancer Council supply the resources to develop a
standardized instrument to assess undergraduate medical students' knowledge of cancer
prevention and screening. This instrument could be used again to determine the knowledge
gained by students when they completed medical school. If gains were found to be adequate,
then no changes in instruction would be necessary. If, on the other hand, gains were
inadequate, faculty would have the data showing that changes in instruction were warranted
[13].
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