Collaborating Across the University

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Collaborating Across the University
and Beyond

• Judith Albino, PhD
• AAL Senior Consultant
• President Emerita and Associate Dean
• Colorado School of Public Health

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Goals for the Session

• Analyze cases with collaboration as the goal.
• Identify obstacles to collaboration in various
  areas of academic work.
• Use the four frames to develop strategies for
  addressing obstacles to collaboration.
• Consider how you can develop new collaborative
  efforts or improve current collaborations at your
  school.
• Outline a plan for the collaboration you want to
  accomplish.

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Collaboration doesnt just happen

• Understanding both positive energy and resistance
  is essential.
• Consider structural, human,
• political, symbolic frames.
• Build a sense of urgency.
• Create a vision.
• Build a coalition.
• Plan, evaluate, revise.
• Institutionalize collaboration.

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When You Meet Resistance

• Consider
• What makes this difficult?
• Who will have to change?
• Who loses or gains power?
• What would be better?
• Who would benefit?
• Who will get the credit?

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Lets try it out.

• Working in groups, read and discuss your case,
  then answer the questions on your work sheet, and
  plan to report out.

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Group Reports
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Case 1. Team Science The New Challenge

• Great State University has just received a
  Clinical and Translational Science Award (CTSA)
  as academic dean, you are the point person from
  the dental school. Your school had very little
  input to the application, but the dean says it
  now is time to make this real especially in
  terms of research. You know that you need to
  engage more dental faculty in research, and that
  you need to engage them in collaborative research
  with faculty in the other schools at Great State
  Medicine, Pharmacy, Nursing, and Allied Health.
  The other schools have associate deans for
  research, but each is larger than the dental
  school and all generate more NIH funding. In the
  case of the medical school, the difference is 100
  to 1 the dental school has about 2 million
  annually in funded research. You met with the
  associate dean for research at the medical
  school, but he had little advice for you about
  stimulating collaboration. That is best worked
  out by individual faculty members who discover
  shared interests, he said. You dont know where
  to turn next. Most of the bench research is
  focused on materials, and there is one faculty
  member in community dentistry who is engaged in a
  project at one of the hospitals downtown. You
  know that many clinical faculty believe that they
  dont have time for research, even though some
  scholarly activity is expected. As one
  outstanding clinical faculty member said, why
  would I spend my time on research? Im not good
  at that I am good at teaching students in the
  clinic. Hes got a point, but the CTSA is
  intended to stimulate
• clinical research. What to do?

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Case 2. Interprofessional Education

• There is a lot of talk nationally about
  Interprofessional Education, but the silence is
  deafening at Northern State University Dental
  School where you are academic dean. Although the
  dental accreditation standards now require
  competence in communicating and collaborating
  with other health disciplines, it is not clear
  how that should happen. Moreover, as things
  began moving on the IPE front at NSU, dentistry
  seems to be waiting for the next train. You were
  invited to, and attended, some organizational
  meetings, but this morning you heard that all
  medical, nursing, and pharmacy students will
  engage in a semester-long interprofessional
  experience. A call to the program director
  resulted in his response that the program is
  built around cases that dont have much to do
  with dentistry and that well just have to keep
  working on this. Your deans response is that
  interprofessional experiences occur naturally in
  hospital rotations, but you think that response
  misses the mark. Training in interdisciplinary
  team processes will be offered, and you believe
  that it should be available to dental students,
  as well as those in other schools. One or two
  clinical faculty members expressed some interest
  in IPE early on, but its difficult to know how
  to engage them when it seems that dentistry isnt
  part of the universitys plan. You know that you
  need some allies, and you also need a plan for
  bringing the breadth and depth of dental practice
  to the attention of others at the
  university.

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Case 3. Managing Up When You Are Down

• As Director of Clinics at Silverton University
  School of Dentistry, you have wanted to develop a
  model for clinical education that replicates a
  group practice model. This requires several
  faculty members working in teams with smaller
  groups of students at different levels of their
  professional program. A new dental building has
  been fully funded by the gift of a major donor,
  and plans for clinics in the new building are
  being finalized. You chaired a committee that
  worked over the past year to review and evaluate
  clinical education at the school in preparation
  for this move. The faculty are with you, and the
  plan that the committee has come up with is
  innovative and detailed. In the deans words,
  however, it is too radical. The alumni, he
  says, would never go for it. The dean is a great
  fundraiser, an outgoing man, who has been in his
  role for 20 years and often is viewed as a sort
  of godfather figure, but he has not kept up
  with innovations in dental education. You
  respect the work he has done for the School, but
  this time, you believe that he is wrong. Many
  alumni, and especially a large number of those
  who graduated 10-20 years ago, are working in
  group practices. You described the new clinical
  teaching model to some of them, and they found it
  exciting and want to help. You had an opportunity
  to briefly describe the plan to the VP for Health
  Programs who seemed interested primarily from
  the perspective of program innovation, but he
  just urged you to work with the dean to get it
  implemented. Youre discouraged and
• wonder how you can make this happen.

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Case 4. Community Health Concerns

• You are the Chair of Community Dentistry in a
  dental school that is perceived as having pulled
  back from the community several years ago. That
  happened because the opportunity for a new school
  building, with abundant clinic space, meant that
  using hospital and community clinics was no
  longer necessary to accommodate the expanding
  dental school class size. The result was that
  for many years, patients often drove long
  distances to use your services, which are
  designated and supported as a safety net clinic
  by the state. Times have changed, and there is
  now genuine interest on the part of the School in
  getting students back into the community to
  experience oral health disparities up close and
  also to broaden the training experience in terms
  of the opportunities that may be available to
  graduates. As you began reaching out to the
  hospitals and community health centers, however,
  you did not receive a warm welcome. Even
  visiting with churches in the community, you
  found that people had a negative image of the
  University of CityState and especially the
  dental school. Memories are long, it seems and
  the School is described as having abandoned the
  community. How do we know you wont do it
  again? You have a large commitment of funds to
  realize this new model, but you are stumped as to
  how to make the friends you need. The best
  option for success is to work with, and build on,
  the relationships and services of current
  community institutions. But how can you do that
  now?

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Case 5. Practice Makes Perfect

• As an associate dean at MidSouth University, one
  of your responsibilities is developing and
  sustaining relationships with organized dentistry
  and the practice community. Recently released
  reports at both the national and state level have
  highlighted oral health as a top priority for
  improving population health. There is an
  opportunity here that could result in a win-win
  for dental practice and dental education. A
  public communications plan is contemplated that
  would highlight oral health problems, dental
  practice as a solution, and the need to train
  more dentists. To date, however, the State
  Dental Association has seemed to want to go its
  own way, simply underwriting a 1-800-dentist
  type of campaign. You have suggested instead a
  focus on the high level training of dentists, the
  research occurring in dental schools and the pro
  bono work of both schools and practitioners,
  along with the role of practicing dentists in
  creating overall health in the community. This
  would highlight the major public benefits of
  dental academic and professional services and
  activities, as well as help people to understand
  their individual health issues. The State
  Association is resistant, however, and even after
  a presentation at their meeting, they seem more
  focused on messages that get people into their
  offices. You feel as though you have hit a wall,
  but there must be a way to collaborate.

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Group Reports
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Whats Your Plan for Collaboration?

• During the last part of this session, you will
  work to further develop your plan for
  collaborative activity at your university.
• Work in pairs to share your plans and seek
  advice, focusing on what you perceive to be the
  greatest challenge to implementation of your
  plan.
• Decide which of the four frames will be most
  helpful in addressing the obstacles your face.

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Final Notes on Collaboration

• Collaborating is a journey.
• Collaboration always involves change, and
  collaborations will change over time.
• Collaborations require mutual benefit.
• Collaborations are fragile.
• Collaborations are more than the sum of their
  parts.

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Enjoy and celebrate your collaborations!

• Judith