Contact from my almamater - Go WEBER!

I emailed my first year instructor, Frances McConaughy, at Weber State regarding our first assignment. She had a huge influence on me. She use to call me the "swarthy brunette". (Only my colorist knows the truth!) It was our first year in the program and her first year of teaching, and boy was she tough! She is still at WSU and was kind enough to respond. Below are her comments regarding their clinic.

1. What is your job description? A clinic coordinator in our institution has responsibility for supervising students as well as adjunct faculty that are affiliated with their clinics. They have huge coordination responsibilities, and since they are faculty appointments, they also have teaching responsibilities. So they have both clinical teaching and classroom or didactic teaching responsibilities. These, obviously, correspond with the level of student, so a junior coordinator has more introductory material to cover, ie. instrumentation, pt. mgmt., caries control to name a few. The senior coordinator will have advanced instrumentation, more perio management, etc.

2. Who in your faculty is in charge of clinic protocols? Really, all faculty have input, including our adjuncts. But the primary responsibility should lie with the clinic coordinators, this too is part of their job description.

3. How does your school train and calibrate faculty? Who does it? We have regular faculty calibration meetings which are held for both junior and senior faculty including adjuncts. We generally choose topics, ie. classifying patients, evaluating radiographs, etc. and then have exercises--ie. what would you do/or how would you score/evaluate this particular situation and then we talk about this. But often, the discussion defaults to reminders of clinic protocols, because there is so much to manage and oversee.

4. Who is responsible for communication of clinic protocols? The clinic coordinators are primarily responsible for this, to students and to adjunct faculty. However, we also try to note all policies/protocols in the clinic manual which is a major reference for both junior/senior classes and faculty. We update this annually.

5. Who keeps track of student progress? Who keeps track of student
clinic grades? The junior/senior coordinators keep track of progress and/or the other contract faculty. We do not have adjuncts, generally speaking, keep track of this. The faculty also have regular conferences with the students to track their progress.