UNMC is one of 13 schools that will be hosting the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s Summer Health Professions Education Program (SHPEP).
Following 13 years of success with a six-week summer academic enrichment program that offers underrepresented freshman and sophomore college students intensive and personalized preparation for applying to medical and dental schools, RWJF, along with Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC) and the American Dental Education Association (ADEA), announced in October the names of 13 schools, including UNMC, that had been successful in applying to provide an expanded focus to the former Summer Medical and Dental Education Program (SMDEP).
The student perspective
Sebastian Lane attended SMDEP in 2013 as a medical student. Last summer, he returned as a teaching assistant.
“The program was an opportunity for me to get an experience of what medical school is like and what it would take to be a medical student,” he said. “It helped solidify that it was my goal, and also what it would take to get there.”
The opportunity to meet with current medical students during the program made a “big impact on my decision to come to UNMC,” he said.
Likewise, dental student Rafaila Ramirez called the SMDEP a great experience.
“Getting to spend Friday afternoons at the dental college for six weeks just further motivated me to work harder in my studies so that I could one day see myself as a dentist,” she said. “While there, I also got the chance to meet individuals from various parts of the U.S. who were also aspiring to reach the same goal I was, which was to someday be a health care professional. To this day I still keep in touch with some of those individuals.”
The renamed SHPEP program continues to be supported through funding from the RWJF and has now expanded to incorporate learning opportunities for students interested in careers across other health professions.
At UNMC, which has hosted the program since 2005 and was successful in being chosen as an ongoing participant, Cheryl Thompson, Ph.D., assistant vice chancellor for academic affairs and co-principal investigator for the grant which funds the program, said UNMC’s SHPEP will continue to accept students interested in dentistry and medicine, but also will be open to students considering nursing, public health and allied health professions.
“The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation was interested in reaching a broader range of potential health care providers,” Dr. Thompson said. “They are interested in diversity and underrepresented students, and they were concerned that these issues exist in a wide range of health professions.”
Co-PI Janet Guthmiller, D.D.S., Ph.D., dean of the UNMC College of Dentistry, said that the enthusiasm of the other colleges in seeking to join the program was gratifying, but unsurprising.
“It’s a tribute to our past work together, our collaborative and interprofessional efforts historically,” she said. “Broadening it out to additional health professions is in keeping with what we’re trying to do from an interprofessional education and collaborative care perspective in our respective educational programs.”
Dr. Guthmiller said she foresees success for the expanded programs.
“What we have experienced is that the connections that are made in these pipeline programs, even if they don’t become students of ours in our respective programs, they are accepted in programs throughout the country, and they continue to reach back to us,” she said.
Next year, UNMC will accept 40 medical, 20 dental, 10 nursing, 10 public health and 10 allied health students.
The College of Allied Health Professions is actually paying the cost to support students interested in careers as physical therapists or physician assistants.
The expansion in scope means UNMC will be collaborating more with community colleges as well as our traditional four-year undergraduate institutions to accept students, said Dele Davies, M.D., vice chancellor for academic affairs and the co-principal investigator along with Drs. Thompson and Guthmiller.
“The UNMC SMDEP program saw more than 80 percent of our alumni who applied successfully going on to medical or dental school, and our surveys indicate that the alumni found our program to be very beneficial,” Dr. Davies said.
“Given the collaborative interprofessional nature of our programs at UNMC and intense interest shown by our other colleges to participate, I am very gratified that the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, AAMC and ADEA chose us as an ongoing site for the expanded program. I am optimistic that the new SHPEP program will be equally successful as a pipeline for introducing underrepresented minorities to other health professions,” he said.
Further information about the SHPEP can be found here.