Five questions with Dr. Larry Jacobs, Associate Dean, Schulich Medicine & Dentistry – Windsor Campus
Why did you decide to make this shift in your career and take on this role?
I really loved what I was doing. I have a wonderful clinical practice and I have been very actively involved with teaching both residents and students. I was already involved from an administrative standpoint.
But when I got the word that this position was becoming available, I really started to think about the 'why'. I love teaching and working with students and residents; I have much pride in this city, the Campus and the School, and the opportunity to be more involved really appealed to me.
As we move through a time of great change in medical education, for our Campus and School, the chance to be on the ground floor helping to make the decisions that will impact our faculty and helping to determine the future of the Campus was a really exciting opportunity for me.
Will you be continuing with your practice? How will you divide up your time?
I plan to continue my hospital work on the Clinical Teaching Unit as I have been doing, and that will allow me to continue working clinically with students and residents and I definitely didn’t want to give that up.
However, I did have to give up something, so I will be reducing my clinical practice and spending about 40 per cent of my time on it.
By nature, I’m a night owl, and I’ve always been able to carve out a living while others are sleeping, so I expect that will continue.
What are some of your first tasks as the new Associate Dean, and what are you hoping to complete in your first 90 days?
I have a great deal of outreach planned.
I think that whenever you take on a big role like this one, it’s important to begin by getting to know the different perspectives of all the stakeholders. I want to invest a great deal of time working with the faculty in Windsor and hearing about their perceptions of the various medical education initiatives that are ongoing, understand their challenges, learn about their successes and continued interests.
I’m organizing visits to each of the hospitals and I’m going to try to be at the different sites outside of regular business hours so I can connect with as many faculty members as is possible.
I’m also hoping to host a series of 'fireside chats' with students to really engage them in the art of the medical profession and have conversations about medicine, leadership and earning and retaining the public trust.
I have a strong commitment to the School’s social responsibility to the community and I’d like to see us work more closely with the local school boards. As part of that, I would see our medical students spending time in classrooms and engaging with the broader student population.
I also want to see us playing a bigger role in supporting mental health needs in the community, and I’m going to be determining how best to partner with some local organizations, as well as departments at the University of Windsor to achieve this.
With so many initiatives and projects ongoing, what do you believe is the most significant priority for medical education in the next year and in the coming years?
I believe that our biggest priority is creating a framework for competency-based medical education that will work in a distributed campus. The practice patterns for our faculty are different than those in the academic health care communities, and there is very little literature out there to guide us. As we develop this framework, I believe there is the opportunity for some scholarly efforts focused on the implications of this transition and the impact on learners and faculty members.
2018 marks the 10th anniversary of the Schulich Medicine – Windsor Campus, and there have been some wonderful achievements. What opportunity do you think could be realized in the next 10 years?
Looking ahead to beyond 2019, my goal for this Campus is to be a destination campus for prospective medical students.
Our geographical position presents some unique and interesting opportunities for us, the School and our universities, and I believe there is untapped potential to develop research with the health care networks and schools in the United States.
I’ve always believed the School’s most important asset is its faculty, and so I will be working to ensure our faculty are engaged and feel well supported to deliver the art and science of our profession. Short- and long-term, I want to understand and enrich the communication we have with faculty. I’m making it my mission to meet them and hear what they have to say, how we can better communicate with them, and meet their needs and those of our students.
