As health professions educators, we feel responsibility to provide support to learners who struggle, and at the same time, we have responsibility to society to graduate learners who are fully competent for the profession. After defining remediation and the trajectories of learners who struggle, we will move through a framework to identify, intervene with, and assess our learners, and evaluate our programs of remediation, to help learners and ensure their success.

The current landscape of undergraduate medical education provides foundations at varying depths of knowledge that will not only be needed for board examinations but also progressively needed for the clinical years as well. The ongoing challenge of undergraduate medical education is displayed by curriculum calendars and the volumes of content consumed by students and produced by schools. These challenges manifest themselves in a small percentage of students failing to meet the minimal competency and then being asked to repeat a year or a course. Awareness of the many influencing factors on the curriculum illustrates the need for a bridge to help the struggling student but also provides the tools, time, and resources to ensure the student is able to be successful moving forward.

The offering of the off-cycle curriculum is a mechanism for allowing students in the DO program an opportunity to complete the pre-clinical portion of the DO curriculum in 3 years instead of the traditional 2 years. The offering of this program is strictly voluntary and cannot be required for student participation. The off-cycle curriculum offers the student an opportunity to significantly improve course performance outcomes by decelerating a required portion of the curriculum. The decelerated pace of progressing through the curriculum allows the student to learn the material and create new habits to become a lifelong learner. Although this differs from the traditional Flexner model, it takes into consideration the type of students who are matriculating into our medical school program. These students range from the students newly progressing from their undergraduate studies to the student who is progressing from the workforce. This curriculum is a chance to establish the foundation needed to not only matriculate through medical school but also become a successful physician. Any student who is enrolled in the off-cycle curriculum must successfully complete all required courses of the first and second preclinical curriculum. Upon decelerating, students in the off-cycle curriculum will delay their graduation by one year, and are subject to revisions in curriculum requirements and changes in tuition and fees of their new graduating class.

This session will assist educators in understanding how mental health difficulties can interfere with student success, both academically and professionally, and provide strategies for preventing and remediating failures attributed to mental illness.

In this webinar, we will describe how Learning Communities can be used to support struggling students. Learning Communities are intentionally formed groups of students and faculty who actively learn from each other while building relationships that enhance support networks. LC programs can assist struggling students in a multitude of ways and can be easily integrated with other student support structures in a medical school. We will describe how this is done at a variety of institutions across the country.

Underrepresentation of Black, Indigenous, and people of color (BIPOC) in the health professions limits the U.S. health care system’s ability to meet the needs of people in these racial/ethnic groups. A growing body of research shows that patient-physician concordance of race, language, and social characteristics strengthen the patient-physician relationship through higher levels of trust and satisfaction. This webinar will describe the barriers that BIPOC persons face in pursuing health professions education, present a framework for conceptualizing strategies for improving recruitment, retention, and academic success among BIPOC health professions trainees, and describe examples of these strategies. The presentation will focus primarily on examples from medicine and the basic sciences.