The state’s oldest medical school, in a warning issued more than a year ago, was told its accreditation could be in jeopardy absent “substantial improvement” in areas that include research opportunities, and clinical experiences.
Rutgers University made the Liaison Committee on Medical Education concerns public last week, when it sent an email to faculty, students, and staff in the wake of an anonymous letter by a group of self-described whistleblowers that had begun circulating on campus. The actual warning notice was issued on October 2021.
Responding to questions about the LCME action and the delay in reporting it, Rutgers officials said the medical school continued to be fully accredited after the warning was issued, and expect to address any problems before the LCME returns next month.
Robert Johnson, the dean of New Jersey Medical School, attributed the red flags to surveys of dissatisfied students that were conducted at the height of the COVID pandemic, which had forced a greater reliance on virtual learning at Rutgers and elsewhere.
“The surveys were done in 2020 and that was a really bad time,” he said. “I had taken all students out of clinical rotations because the hospitals were full of COVID. We closed down many of the face-to-face meetings and turned to virtual learning. Looking back at it, I think I made the right decision for the safety of students. But we had no idea what the other impacts would be.”
Despite the survey results, Johnson said that the school’s student test scores and residency matches, used to place medical students into a U.S. residency programs, remain above the national average.
“Doctors are being trained,” he said. “We graduate students, and they learned very well. But the environment they had wasn’t the one they were used to.”
Based on the criteria of the committee, the dean said LCME likely had no other choice but to issue a warning.
“The comments (from the student surveys) were significantly less than they were, based on the benchmarks they had,” he conceded. But he said he does not believe the action by the LCME means the program is in any sort of crisis.
“I’m not losing any sleep at night worrying about losing accreditation,” he said. “We’re not on probation. The warning is that if you don’t do something, your accreditation could be in jeopardy. I fully expect when they come back in February, we’re going to be okay.”
In his email last week, Johnson did not address the school’s delay in informing members of the faculty or students about the accreditation issues, or the criticism of what some called unwarranted secrecy. He wrote that the 2021 visit by the Liaison Committee on Medical Education led to the school’s continued accreditation, but had cited areas of non-compliance and had warned the university that failure to show substantial improvement would jeopardize accreditation.
“Some of the most important areas that were cited include certain faculty behavior modeling; adequacy of student wellness services; effectiveness of the University financial aid office; needed improvements to the curriculum; and our students’ satisfaction with classroom, lecture hall and study/relaxation space, both in the MSB (the medical science building in Newark) and in certain affiliate hospitals,” Johnson wrote.
In its October 2021 letter to Rutgers President Jonathan Holloway, which was obtained by the faculty union through a public records request — albeit heavily redacted — the LCME raised issues regarding the sufficiency of faculty, the medical school’s affiliation agreements, its research opportunities, its diversity programs, the sufficiency of its building and equipment, its academic and career advising, and required clinical experiences.
While the warning was never made public by the university, it is not required to do so by the LCME.
The committee did raise the potential for further enforcement.
“If in the judgment of the LCME, the program has not made sufficient progress by the time specified for correction, it may impose probation or withdraw accreditation,” the university was told in the letter to Holloway.
Diomedes Tsitouras, executive director of the AAUP-BHSNJ, the American Association of University Professors – Biomedical and Health Sciences of New Jersey, which represents 1,500 faculty at Rutgers and Rowan Universities, criticized what he called a lack of transparency and accountability over the accreditation process.
“Nobody said anything to faculty until two months ago, after the anonymous letter surfaced,” he complained. “Everyone was kept in the dark.”
That letter, said to be written six faculty members, including one department chair, first raised the question over why the medical school did not make public the warning status. The writers said they only became aware of the issue after other faculty members from their sister Rutgers medical school, Robert Wood Johnson Medical School in New Brunswick, asked how their administration was addressing the situation.
“This was the first time we had heard about the warning status,” they wrote. “To learn about this from the RWJMS faculty is shocking. The dean’s office has been unresponsive to any faculty requests to gain information about our accreditation status.”
At the same time, they said some of them had served on the committees that prepared for the LCME review, and called the process “disorganized and rushed,” blaming one of the medical school’s administrators for “pushing through” things with little faculty involvement.
Johnson said the matter was never kept secret.
“There was notice to those people who needed to be involved,” he said. “It was talked about.”
The dean acknowledged there were researchers or those involved in clinical care who may not have known, but he did not believe they needed to be told.
“We let them know we were fully accredited. I don’t know there needed to be a wider announcement. The people who needed to know, did know,” he responded.
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Ted Sherman may be reached at tsherman@njadvancemedia.com. Follow him on Twitter @TedShermanSL
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