Dr. Whelan has experience teaching residents and third-year medical students and is the Course Director for the core outpatient clerkship for third-year students. She has a particular interest in Quality Improvement (QI) and taught the third-year quality improvement curriculum during the Community Based Longitudinal Care (CBLC) Clerkship for several years. She is also the Quality Improvement Clinic Lead for the UNC Internal Medicine clinic at Panther Creek.
Dr Whelan has worked on a grant supported project which involved developing and implementing a health equity focused QI curriculum for 3rd-year (clinical medical students). She integrated health equity and social justice into the existing QI curriculum, thus providing students with experiential learning that would enable them to battle systemic health disparities. As part of this endeavor, her team rigorously evaluated the interventions by obtaining student feedback, preceptor feedback and assessing patient outcomes for multiple QI measures. Additionally, they utilized preceptor feedback to increase QI resources for preceptors and incentivize them to participate in health-equity focused QI by providing Maintenance of certification credits for their participation. To support these curricular innovations, she developed teaching materials including ‘Equity QI project planning guides’, poster and project catalogs, instructional videos for accessing equity reports and dashboards, and equity focused project assessment tools.
Dr Whelan has also mentored 4th-year Medical students through the Clinician Leadership in Quality and Safety (CLQS) Scholarly Concentration. Her CLQS mentee projects have focused on Social Determinants of Health (SDOH) screening and on diabetes health equity in Hispanic, Latinx and Spanish-speaking patients.
