News Briefs

Physical Therapy Program Reaccredited for Ten Years, Earns Four Commendations

Lichter Receives Prestigious Epilepsy Foundation Award

Faculty Members Receive Awards for Outstanding Teaching

CLS Announces Scholarship Recipients

Upper Midwest Rural Health Summit  Attendees Discuss Rural Health Policy

Commonwealth Fund Visits North Dakota

Espejo Honored with Two Awards

Record Number of Students Participate in This Year’s ROME Program

Match Results

Physical Therapy Program Reaccredited for Ten Years, Earns Four Commendations

The Physical Therapy (PT) Program has been reaccredited for ten years by the national agency which accredits more than 200 such programs across the United States. The reaccreditation report from the Commission on Accreditation in Physical Therapy Education (CAPTE) included four commendations for the program and cited no areas of non-compliance, a rare phenomenon. The program offers a Doctor of Physical Therapy (DPT) degree

through the Department of Physical Therapy.

“It is unusual” for a program not to be required to file a progress report to address certain issues as part of the reaccreditation process, said Tom Mohr, Ph.D. (B.S.P.T. ’75, Ph.D. in Physiology ’86), professor and chair of physical therapy. UND’s program is one of only two, of those reviewed this year, which had no deficiencies and no progress report.

The CAPTE report gave particular emphasis to the high quality of the faculty, both academic, those teaching at the university, and clinical, those who are affiliated with the program and teach at

more than 300 sites in 24 states. It also noted that the program “has made concerted efforts to train clinical faculty in the use of library search and resource opportunities,” adding that these effort are “likely to result in more evidence-based practice in the clinical community...”

The CAPTE report commended the program “for providing continuing education opportunities for clinical educators which has

enabled more than 200 physical therapists to become certified

clinical instructors, thus improving the quality of clinical education for PT students in the region.”

Reviewers commended UND on its “strong clinical program,” Mohr said, noting that students spend 36 weeks learning from clinical preceptors, nine weeks each in the areas of acute care, orthopedics, neuro-rehabilitation and a specialty of their choice such as pediatrics or sports medicine.

“The outcome assessment program was highly rated,” Mohr said. This is an effort by the department to obtain valuable feedback from students, graduates, employers and patients, and clinical instructors that can be used to make improvements in the program.

It also cited the high quality of the students and how well they do, the program and the curriculum, he said. It also recognized that the UND program “is a major resource for the PT workforce in North Dakota and the mid-western region.”

This was the first accreditation visit for the PT program since the Doctor of Physical Therapy (DPT) degree program was initiated in 2002. The DPT degree takes three-and-one-half years to

complete following a pre-physical therapy program of at least three years. The program admits 48 students in each class for a total enrollment of 144 at UND’s Grand Forks campus.

The department also offers an on-line DPT degree, which does not require students to come to the UND campus, that has been completed by 50 students and is expected to be completed in

December this year by another 35 students — all of whom are physical therapists who have been employed for several years and wish to earn an advanced degree in their field.

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Lichter Receives Prestigious Epilepsy Foundation Award

Jessica Lichter, second-year medical

student, has received a

$3000 grant from the Epilepsy Foundation to conduct epilepsy research in the lab of Van Doze, Ph.D., associate professor of

pharmacology, physiology and therapeutics, Grand Forks.

The daughter of Gerald Lichter and Sandra Selland-Lichter of Grand Forks won the Epilepsy Foundation Health Science Student Fellowship, a nationally competitive award.  She is one of only

three health science students in the nation to receive this prestigious award.

Epilepsy is a neurological disease characterized by recurrent seizures, she says.  Her project aims to uncover the mechanisms by which norepinephrine, a naturally-occurring compound in the brain, inhibits epileptic seizures.

“The debilitating and sometimes fatal nature of epilepsy makes the search for treatment of great priority and urgency,” says Lichter who is interested in becoming a neurologist and “is fascinated by the possibility of combining my interests in epilepsy research and neuroscience with medical practice.”

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Faculty Members Receive Awards for Outstanding Teaching

Medical students presented awards to outstanding teachers earlier this spring.  Second-year medical students presented the Golden Apple Award for outstanding teaching to Steve Hill, M.D. ’90,

associate professor of clinical neuroscience and coordinator of Year 1 Clinical Science in the Office of Medical Education.

First-year medical students selected Patrick Carr, Ph.D., associate professor of anatomy and cell biology, to receive a Golden Apple Award for outstanding teaching.

Tom Hill, Ph.D., professor of microbiology and immunology, received the Portrait Award, given in recognition of outstanding support provided to the students during their first two years of medical education.

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CLS Announces Scholarship Recipients

The Clinical Laboratory Science (CLS) Program has presented awards to the following outstanding students:

--Jean Holland Saumur Hematology Award: Rochelle Cariveau, Grand Forks.

--Ralph and Hazel Rohde Medical Technology Scholarship Award: Rochelle Cariveau, Grand Forks; Hidayo Elmi, Burnsville, MN; Solayman Jama, Minneapolis; Andrew Kerstiens, Larimore;

Zac Lunak, Grand Forks, and Sara Palmer, Williston. All are seniors.

--Eleanor Ratcliffe Award: Cindy Morstad, Drayton, senior.

--Dillenburg Memorial Award: Tara Lease, Roseau, MN, senior.

--Eileen Simonson Nelson Pathology Award: Zac Lunak, Grand Forks, senior.

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Upper Midwest Rural Health Summit  Attendees Discuss Rural Health Policy

Concern for the future of rural health care prompted the Center for Rural Health at the UND medical school to join forces with counterparts in Montana and Minnesota at a rural health summit in August.

The summit focused on the future of rural health care policy and featured keynote presentations by Frank Cerra, M.D., senior vice president for health sciences of the University of Minnesota;

Kristin Juliar, director of the Montana Office of Rural Health and Brad Gibbens, associate director of the UND Center for Rural Health.

“The Summit is an opportunity to gain fresh insights into health policy perspectives, to learn what is happening around the area, to

develop new contacts with people dealing with issues similar to your own,” said Gibbens. “There is continuing discussion and interest in forming a similar association in North Dakota, so with

the summit being co-sponsored by the Minnesota Rural Health Association, there is an opportunity for North Dakotans to ask questions and learn about this opportunity.”

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Commonwealth Fund Visits North Dakota

Sam Fleming, a member of the Commonwealth Fund board of directors and director of Decision Resources Inc.; Steve Schoenbaum, M.D., Commonwealth Fund executive director and executive vice president for programs, and Karen Davis, Ph.D., Commonwealth Fund president, during the site visit to Bismarck.

Members of the Commonwealth Fund’s Commission on High Performance Health System visited Bismarck, ND in July to learn about innovative approaches to delivering high quality, efficient care in a rural setting.

The Center for Rural Health at the UND School of Medicine and Health Sciences hosted the group of about 15 Commission members and senior staff of the Commonwealth Fund,

including its president, Karen Davis, Ph.D.

While in Bismarck, Commission members learned about high-performance health care in North Dakota, focusing specifically on innovative applications of telemedicine and networks that

provide economical, efficient, and high-quality health care. The group heard from providers from across the state and witnessed demonstrations of mental health and pharmacy services delivered via telemedicine technology.

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Espejo Honored with Two Awards

Napoleon Espejo, M.D., clinical assistant professor of family and community medicine and medical director at Family Healthcare Center, Fargo, has been honored as the Transitional Year

Outstanding Teacher of the Year by the Internal Medicine Program at UND.  He also was honored with the Leonard Tow 2007 Humanism in Medicine Award from the school.

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Record Number of Students Participate in This Year’s ROME Program

Ten medical students will study and train with practicing physicians in communities throughout North Dakota through the Rural Opportunities in Medical Education (ROME) program during the 2007-08 academic year.

“This is the largest number of medical students to participate in the ROME program since its inception in 1998,” said Roger Schauer, M.D. (B.S. Med. ’69), program director and associate

professor of family and community medicine. He attributes the popularity of the program to “former ROME students who recruit other students by sharing their excitement and positive

experiences, as well as how much they learned and enjoyed the program. The program really sells itself.”

The ROME program is an interdisciplinary experience in a rural primary care setting which allows students to live and train under the supervision of physician-instructors in communities throughout North Dakota. Generally, the ROME program places two students in each community. Later in the academic year, other students will begin in Dickinson and Devils Lake.

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Match Results

For the class of 2007 match results, click here

Correction: In the article “It’s All About the

Kids” (Summer ’07, page 22), the child in the

photo with Myra Quanrud, M.D. ’90, was

misidentified. The child is Arianna, the youngest

and one of the most medically fragile residents

at the Anne Carlsen Center for Children in Jamestown, ND.

Printable PDF version of issue

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