Clinic Administrator Job Description from Idaho

It was fun to reconnect with Kandi and to look at her responses to the questions. I am amazed by the workload! She works in a University setting without a dental school at Idaho State University.

QUESTION 1: Job Description
Junior Clinic Coordinator, Health & Safety Coordinator, Assistant Professor

QUESTION 1: Job Responsibilities
The list goes on and on!
1.HEALTH & SAFETY COORDINATOR:
Coordinate & host CPR course for faculty and staff (annually)
collect/record vaccination and CPR information from students (annually)
Coordinate annual faculty PPD tests
Ongoing: review infection control literature and provide updates to department (students & faculty) as needed to ensure compliance with infection control guidelines/recommendations
2.JUNIOR CLINIC COORDINATOR:
Coordinate faculty and student schedules, supervise 27 junior students and 10 faculty, liaison for students and faculty. track student progress, meet with students at midterm & finals and as needed for students not progressing appropriately. Daily/weekly monitoring of grade sheets/feedback from clinic faculty. Make appropriate student referrals. Meet with dept. chair and senior clinic coordinator as needed (and for mentoring).
3. ASSISTANT PROFESSOR:
Teacing, research, service(University, College, Dept, Professional). Participate in weekly faculty meeting, dept. strategic planning, curriculum review, and upcoming 2010 accreditation process.
Teaches 2 courses per semester (as coordinator)
4. RESEARCH:
Must be working on a major or minor project at all times and must be disseminated within a reasonable time frame. Currently is trying to publish at least 1 article/year in a refereed journal, try to present national or international 1/yr (poster or paper), working on long term research agenda, networking/working closely with OSAP on infection control research agenda.
5. SERVICE:
She must do College, University, Dept, and Professional service. Currently, she serves on their college's research committee (organize an annual research day event for faculty which is an opportunity for faculty to get CE and present research). Also serves on the University's Undergrad research committee, where they give money awards for student research. Her dept service is wide & varied. From tenure committee, to curriculum review, strategic planning, upcoming accreditation 2010, volunteer projects (GKAS), health fairs, international special olympics, career fairs, etc. Her professional service is to IDHA, where she serves as HYPAC chair. They raise funds for legislative efforts. Kandi manages the books/checkbook and attend 4 board meetings/year plus committee kickoff where yearly strategic planning occurs, She submits 10 reports/yr to the ID Secretary of State. HYPACs major fundraiser occurs at their annual session. She coordinates a fitness event and it brings in quite a bit of money. She help with silent and live auction. She assembles and delivers packets annually to give to ID legislators before they go into session. HYPAC supports ID legislators who are supportive of DH.

QUESTION 2: Who is responsible for developing protocols?
Most of the protocols have been in place for 30+ years. However, they are experiencing a change of the guards. People are retiring. Kandi works closely with the senior coordinator, expanded functions coordinator, and the dept chair. They assign sections (in their area of expertise) at the end of the year (May) and are charged with updating & revising their Policy & Procedure Manual. Their dept chair reviews the changes usually with no editing, but sometimes overrides. They generally do not discuss as a group unless major changes are made, which is rarely.

QUESTION 3: Who monitors student progress? How are they monitored?
each coordinator (jr or sr) monitors clinical progress via daily evaluations and weekly reports. Students also have an assigned academic advisor in the dept. who works closely with the clinical coordinators when issues arise. They also have designated faculty meeting (clinical & full time) in which they discuss student progress. Usually these happen right before or at midterm so they can ward off problems before they get too big. They have extra remediation for students in 2 ways, skill development sessions on Friday pm and they have a "roving" faculty who roves in 1/wk and students can sign up for extra 1-on-1 help. Clinic coordinators meet w/ students minimally at midterm & finals, and more often if there are problems.

QUESTION 4: How is what you do communicated to other faculty?
Usually via clinical and full time faculty meetings. Sometimes informally in discussions or email/memorandum.

QUESTION 5: Who takes responsibiity in your program for communicating clinic protocols?
Usually clinic coordinators and the dept chair.

QUESTION 6: How does your school train & calibrate faculty? How often is calibration done?
TRAINING: initial new faculty usually shadow a seasoned clinical faculty for at least 1-2 semesters. Kandi shadowed her first semester and half of her second semester. She was not alone until midterm of spring semester her first year. This helped her to see how others grade, etc and to learn the ropes. She said it was very different from Minnesota!

CALIBRATION: Is often done in clinical faculty meetings and annually right before clinic starts. Junior clinic has 10-11 faculty on various days, so calibration is EXTREMELY difficult, hurried and last minute. They have experienced a lot of turn over in the past 5 years. Kandi hopes to alleviate this "last minute" calibration the longer she is the jr coordinator. They normally calibrate before testing, so it usually is a discussion of the criteria (grade sheet) and demo on a dentoform/typodont. We discuss what happened the year before, etc so true calibration it is not. Kandi hope to implement some formal calibration exercises in the coming years. Calibration is a HUGE issue in jr clinic. Novice students do not always realize we are saying the same thing.

QUESTION 7: How do your track grades? Computer? Some type of form? Who tracks student grades?
Their grades are tracked via the daily grade sheet and entered into the computer. They have an administrative assistant who works closely with the jr and sr clinic coordinators to run reports and keep track of the voluminous amount of data. Their students have 10 graded areas on each grade sheet. They have grades for health history, oral assessment, scaling procedures, polishing, etc. The adminstrative assistant also track their requirements/caseload (number of patients/types of patients/geriatric/child). Coordinators and students get weekly reports.

Whew!! I am exhausted just thinking of all of this. There are so many facets to ONE POSITION!!!

Talk to you all on Monday!!
Kim