APAP Honors Faculty and Programs at Awards Luncheon

By Eileen Evans

The awards luncheon gives APAP the opportunity to formally thank those PA faculty and programs whose contributions both sustain APAP and keep it moving forward and honor those who were selected for one of APAP’s awards. This year’s event, moderated by Paul Lombardo, then president elect, was sponsored in part by Academic Management Systems (AMS), that provides some of the CASPA software to APAP.

Steve Milam, JD, and Cheryl Cameron, PhD, JD, feature editors of the Academic Law series in Perspective, demonstrate the friendly one-upmanship they maintain
characterizes their working relationship.

APAP Education Committee

Lombardo extended thanks on APAP’s behalf to the Education Committee which, under the direction of Rena Mitchell of the SUNY Downstate Medical Center PA Program, planned and carried out the educational portion of the forum. Members of the committee — Rena, Kris Healy, Michele Heinan, Theresa Johnson, Patricia Ragan, Richard Rahr, and Emily WhiteHorse — were asked to stand. Lombardo also thanked Nora Lowy, Karen Hills, Gloria Stewart, Kevin Lohenry, Meredith Davison, Jim Van Rhee, Tracey Graham, Dennis Tekippe, and board liaison Walt Eisenhauer for giving so generously of their time and energy to this significant aspect of the APAP’s Semiannual and Education meetings.

APAP Board Members

The terms of three APAP board members — David Asprey, Patrick Knott, and Rosann Ippolito — expired with this meeting. Jim Cawley, then president, gave brief sketches of their accomplishments on the board and presented them with gifts for their outstanding service. Asprey also received the past president’s pin. Cawley was due to transition from president to immediate past president and Lombardo from president elect to president.

APAP Awards

The APAP awards were established to recognize excellence and diversity in teaching, research, and service to PA education, the Association, and the profession. This year, The APAP Nominations and Awards Committee selected winners in the following categories: New Faculty Award for Professional Excellence; Master Teacher Award; Outstanding Service Award; Research Achievement Award; Partnership Award; and the first-time Excellence Through Diversity Award. The presentations were moving, and even humorous, depending on the nature of the slides running simultaneously with the moderator’s narration of the winners’ achievements.The faculty audience seemed to enjoy the event wholeheartedly.

The Master Teacher Award honoring J. Dennis Blessing, the Research Achievement Award presented to Richard Dehn, and the Partnership Award to the STEER program that partners with the PA program at the University of Texas at San Antonio will be featured in the January 2004 Update.

APAP New Faculty Award for Professional Excellence

Jeanne Cavalieri, MSPA, RPA-C, from the Stony Brook PA Program was selected as winner of APAP’s New Faculty Award, instituted to recognize a program faculty or staff member who has made noteworthy contributions to PA education in one or more of the following areas: teaching, administration, scholarship, or service.

Professor Cavalieri, a PA with 23 years’ clinical practice in orthopedics and emergency medicine, joined the Stony Brook faculty in 2001. During her clinical practice, she taught and supervised a large number of PA students from many programs, in addition to medical students and residents. According to Paul Lombardo, her program director at Stony Brook, and Gail Cohen, the program’s medical director, Cavalieri developed a reputation for excellence in clinical teaching that placed her in the top echelon of practicing PAs.

In 1993, Cavalieri was awarded an Honorary Degree of Doctor of Letters in Emergency Medicine by the Albert Einstein College of Medicine for “outstanding abilities…personal dedication, professional demeanor, clinical excellence, and compassionate care, which have served to educate young physicians in the very best qualities for any provider of patient care.” In 1994, she became supervising PA of the emergency department at Long Island Jewish Medical Center. In 2001, Cavalieri received the Outstanding Teaching Award from the Jewish Medical Center for “outstanding commitment to the art of teaching, her patient approach to students and residents of all levels, and her never-ending devotion and contribution to … teaching.” A letter of support from her physician supervisor at the Long Island Jewish Medical Center noted that this type of recognition “had never been achieved by someone in her position and was a true testament to Cavalier’s teaching and organizational skills.”

Cavalieri joined the Stony Brook program faculty full time with a level of commitment and enthusiasm rarely seen in new aspirants to such positions, according to Lombardo. Over the 23 months Jeanne has been with Stony Brook, she has become a highly valued member of the program and school faculty and an outstanding classroom teacher. Lombardo and Cohen credit Cavalieri’s success to her recognition of the value of team effort, her exceptional command of her subject matter, and her organizational abilities. Her ebullience and can-do attitude is infectious and motivates and sustains students and faculty. Cavalieri’s exceptional commitment and ability as a new faculty member are perhaps best exemplified by her response to a colleague’s illness that necessitated Cavalieri’s taking on the responsibilities of the program’s interim director of clinical year education. Cavalieri carried out the administrative responsibilities of this position in a highly competent manner, maintained excellent relations with Stony Brook’s clinical campuses, ensured that the quality of student clinical education never faltered, and even established new inpatient clinical sites. She was subsequently appointed director of clinical year education for the Stony Brook program.

With her first attempt at writing for a peer-reviewed publication, Cavalieri was honored in 2002 as the first-place winner of the AAPA’s Publishing Award for her article, “Responding Rapidly to Occupational Blood and Body-fluid Exposures.” She completed her master’s degree through the University of Nebraska, utilizing further enhancements to her initial revamping of the Stony Brook radiology course as her master’s project.

Cavalieri is a lay minister with her church, as well as a Sunday school teacher, where she often assists fellow parishioners in meeting their health needs and coping with medical and personal problems. Besides participation on many hospital committees, she has been a key member of Stony Brook’s admissions and self-study committees, participating in many presentations on the profession to students on the Stony Brook campus, as well as elementary and high school students in the community and Health Career Opportunities Program (HCOP) students. She serves on the Health Policy and Clinicals and Educational Technology Committees. As part of the program’s ongoing effort to keep PAs on the radar screens of other health professionals, Cavalieri provides instruction to emergency medicine residents and New York State National Registry testing for paramedics.

Cavalieri was presented with a plaque and a check for $500.

APAP Outstanding Service Award

This award is reserved for those who have provided sustained, exceptional service or leadership to APAP or contributed to the advancement of the PA profession in other ways, such as through scholarly activity, teaching, or as an advocate for the profession in the public and private arenas. This year, two individuals — Steve Milam, JD, and Cheryl Cameron, PhD, JD — were selected to receive the award for their unique and insightful contributions over the years in their feature series, Academic Law, which appears on a regular basis in Perspective on Physician Assistant Education. The audience was regaled by the slides Milam and Cameron produced demonstrating their deliberately competitive demeanor.

Several years ago, APAP’s board and Education Committee identified the programs’ need for documents and presentations on academic law and contacted Milam and Cameron. They’ve produced their series since the summer of 1998 and have tackled a number of very difficult issues, such as the following, with applications to PA education

• “To Disclose of Not to Disclose? The Sharing of Student Evaluations with Prospective Clinical Evaluators”;
• “You Don’t Have To But You’ve Decided to Give the Student Another Chance, So…”;
• “Put It in Writing or Be Prepared to Go for a Ride: A Case Study in Due Process”;
• “There’s Never a Good Time for an Academic Dismissal. Don’t Postpone the Inevitable Waiting for the Right Time.”

These editorials have given the profession enduring materials and Cameron and Milam’s published discussions on matters of academic law are of critical importance to PA educators.

Milam served as APAP’s plenary speaker for its Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and the Austin, Texas, meetings. He was also was involved with the Medex PA program in its early days as an assistant attorney general. He was its resource for legal issues involving PA students and the University ranging from failing students, litigation, and policy on hospital privileges for students to clinical affiliation agreements.

APAP was pleased to honor Milam and Cameron with its distinguished Outstanding Service Award for their behind-the-scenes work and dedication to the profession. Both Cameron and Milam received clocks as tokens of APAP’s appreciation.

APAP Excellence Through Diversity Award

The Excellence Through Diversity award was presented for the first time and was established to recognize the outstanding commitment and achievements of an APAP member program in its implementation of specific strategies and activities designed to foster the diversity of program faculty, staff, and student body. The program must demonstrate, among other things, successful outreach to, and recruitment from, diverse and underserved populations.

APAP was pleased to present its first diversity award to the Native American Track of the PA program at the Arizona School of Health Sciences in Mesa, Arizona. The program based its Native American track on the prediction that Native American PAs taking care of Native American people in Indian country will have a positive impact on that population’s health status. In its nomination letter, the Arizona School of Health Sciences stated that in the 2001-2002 academic year, only 0.8 percent of all applicants to PA programs were American Indian/Alaskan Natives, and just 1.1 percent were actually enrolled in a PA program. The program quoted AAPA 2001 census data which stated that only 189 American Indian/Alaskan Native respondents reported practicing as PAs.

The program said that health data clearly showed that no other segment of our society had greater health care needs than those of Native Americans and, while health care is devastatingly inadequate on American reservations, the Arizona program maintained that indicators for native elders were even more dismal. The program maintained that it is widely held that health professional students who originate from rural areas or spend a year of clinical preparation in underserved settings are more likely to establish practice in a rural community.

In 2000 the Arizona PA faculty reviewed the opportunities and barriers they faced in planning and developing a model PA distance education curriculum and program infrastructure for the training of Native American students. Despite the difficulty they encountered in recruiting qualified Native American students into the PA program, in 2001 the charter class of eight Native American students matriculated as a track in the main PA program. The students represented a variety of Indian communities across the United States and Canada. In 2002, four Native Americans were matriculated and in the fall of 2003, seven more Native American students were expected to matriculate.

The Native American program collaborates with the American Indian Program (AIP) of Arizona State University’s (ASU) East Campus, where classroom, office, and lab space were created. The ASU curriculum is designed to recognize the political and strategic necessity of Indian people to assert their tribal identities and focus on developing strong ties with tribal governments. It fills a gap in the intellectual development of American Indian students and allows them to establish their own identity in an intellectual framework that affirms and incorporates their cultural heritage. An undergraduate degree at the state university emphasizes the value of the study of American Indian experiences, cultures, histories, literature, and art and presents these in a scholarly atmosphere. This program helps prepare students for life and employment in a richly diverse world and for postgraduate studies, such as the PA program at the Arizona School of Health Sciences.

A Native American Advisory Council meets several times a year to guide effective program development and continued evaluation. The council is now in the process of formalizing a partnership with an established national training model, the Indians into Medicine (INMED) program in North Dakota, for further assistance in developing and refining the Native American PA program. A pre-matriculation bridging program is also being developed that will give Native American students an opportunity to participate in structured group experiences led by American Indian faculty and students.

The Native American curriculum follows the same format as the on-campus PA program. Course material is delivered via interactive video from the main campus. The laboratory portions of the anatomy course are taught on weekends at the main campus for the Native American students, and the history and physical exam labs are taught at the distance ASU-East classroom and lab.

The Native American PA program is committed to the training and advancement of Native Americans in the PA profession. One of its important outcomes is to develop and encourage leadership skills in its graduates, who become role models and mentors in Indian communities. This year, two students attended the National Congress of American Indians, exemplifying the leadership the program hopes to instill in each of its graduates.

Janne’ Croll, director of the Native American PA track, accepted the Excellence Through Diversity Award on behalf of the Arizona School of Health Sciences for bringing this bold initiative into being.

APAP Research Institute Small Grant Awards

Richard Dehn took the podium to say a few words about the Small Grant Awards and invited Meredith Davison, chair of the Research Institute Research Grants Subcommittee, to present the awards. Six faculty were selected to receive funding for their proposals as part of the 2003 Small Grants program

1. Olive Chen from the PA program at the University of North Texas Health Science Center was awarded funding in the amount of $4,304. Her proposal was entitled “What Non-Cognitive Admission Selection Criteria Can Best Predict PA Students’ Clinical Performance?”

2. David Asprey from the University of Iowa PA Program was awarded $3,185 for his proposal, “Program Director Perceptions of Student Mistreatment during PA Education.”

3. Alyson L. Smith from the Midwestern University PA Program, Downer’s Grove, Illinois, received $1,058 for her proposal, “Childhood Obesity Education in PA Programs.”

4. Two sets of winners hailed from the Midwestern University PA Program in Glendale, Arizona. The first was James D. Stoehr and Alison Essary who received $4,206 for their proposal, “A National Review of Master’s Education and Graduate-Level Core Competencies within PA Programs”; and

5. Susan L. Symington and Lisa Wallace for “Comparing Cultural Competency Education Across PA Programs.” Their award was for $2,442.

6. Theresa Hegmann and Richard Dehn from the University of Iowa PA Program co-authored “Models of Research Instruction in PA Education.” Hegmann received their check for $4,804.

Davison extended thanks to APAP’s winners and non-winners. The winners, she said, recognized that they arrived at that point through many initial rejections. Therefore, she urged non-winners and others with an interest in publishing to persevere. Davison referred to each accepted proposal as another addition to a fully researched and analyzed process that informed PA education and the profession.

Lombardo closed the awards ceremony with congratulations to the winners whose awards were so richly deserved. He thanked them and their programs for their efforts on behalf of APAP, the profession, and PA education.

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