After 23 years, Dr. Gary Beck Dallaghan has left UNMC, but he will still play a role in educating future and current UNMC doctors as the director of the Association of Directors of Medical Student Education in Psychiatry (ADMSEP).
Dr. Gary Beck Dallaghan at the 2018 ADMSEP Annual Meeting
This month, Dr. Beck Dallaghan stepped down from his roles as Assistant Dean for Medical Education, Director of the Office of Medical Education, and Assistant Professor in the UNMC Department of Pediatrics. He has accepted a job as Director of Educational Scholarship at the University of North Carolina School of Medicine at Chapel Hill.
While Dr. Beck Dallaghan will be missed in Omaha, he will still work with UNMC students and faculty as Director of ADMSEP, a role he has held since 2007. Dr. Beck Dallaghan has made it his life’s work to train current and future health providers, which also happens to be ADMSEP’s mission.
“The group started 45 years ago, and the purpose was to give physicians, who teach psychiatry together, a place to network, participate in faculty development and share resources with each other,” Dr. Beck Dallaghan said.
He added that the group has helped provide medical schools with helpful and critical tools to teach their medical students. Dr. Howard Liu, Interim Chair of the UNMC Department of Psychiatry, and Dr. Martin Klapheke, Psychiatry Professor and Assistant Dean of Medical Education at the University of Central Florida, have developed e-modules that Dr. Beck Dallaghan says “trigger discussions on various clinical cases.”
“There have been so many wonderful professional development projects and task forces,” Dr. Beck Dallaghan said. “We have a task force working with geriatric psychiatry. We are constantly creating resources for child and adolescent psychology and psychiatry. We’re creating resources for group addiction programs. Whatever we can do to help a school’s curriculum we will do.”
In June, Dr. Beck-Dallaghan, along with eight other UNMC faculty members, attended the ADMSEP Annual Meeting in Minneapolis. Much like the organization, the annual meeting has grown during Dr. Beck Dallaghan’s tenure as director.
He said in 2007, around 90 medical professionals signed up for the two-day meeting in Park City, Utah. This year, the three-day conference had close to 200 participants.
“The workshops are fantastic. Sessions have always been very well received. Most people come into it, and we try and make them very interactive sessions. You can get something out of it as opposed to sitting there and listening to someone lecture,” said Dr. Beck Dallaghan.
Next year, the ADMSEP annual meeting will be held in Portland, Maine, and Dr. Liu agreed to be the meeting’s secretary.