Dr. Carma Bylund has always had a passion for improving communication in healthcare. It shows in the degree she earned and in how she’s now helping lead UF’s online Graduate Certificate in Implementation Science program as both the associate chair of education and a professor. As you’ll see, she’s also a dedicated researcher actively working with medical professionals to improve the healthcare field.
Dr. Bylund shared insights about her credentials and experience in the implementation science field and how UF’s program benefits professionals in many career stages.
Setting a Foundation for Academia With a PhD
“My PhD is in communication with a focus on health communication — specifically on doctor-patient communication — from Northwestern University,” Dr. Bylund explained. “From the very beginning, I was interested in taking this degree and applying it in the healthcare setting. I was fortunate to work with my mentor there, Dr. Greg Makoul, who started the first program in communication and medicine.”
Improving Communication at a World Leader in Cancer Treatment
A few years after completing her PhD, Dr. Bylund secured a position at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York, recognized worldwide for exceptional cancer care.
“My primary role was to develop a communication skills program to help doctors communicate better. And that’s really where my work in implementation began, because we were taking evidence-based practice and putting it into practice in real-world settings. We have a lot of good evidence about communication in the clinician-patient relationship, specifically in the cancer care context. My position used communication skills training as an implementation strategy.
“We started that program in 2005. A lot of the physicians who were practicing at the time had never had any sort of official training in some of the communication principles — shared decision-making, how to have good end-of-life discussions, how to talk about prognoses, how to present information, how to respond to patients’ anger, emotions — because when they went to medical school, those weren’t required as they are now.”
Dr. Bylund’s work in implementation science would take her all over the world, eventually bringing her to UF.
Spearheading Research, Implementation and Instruction at UF
“Now I’m working with a variety of different health problems and seeing how we can use these implementation strategies of communication skills training to improve those health issues. For example, I work with Dr. Stephanie Staras on improving the implementation of HPV vaccination. I also do work with improving cancer clinical trial recruitment.”
Dr. Bylund teaches courses for our online implementation science program but doesn’t limit herself in her teaching duties. “I do a lot of teaching of medical students, fellows, residents and trainees in graduate medical education. That also helps to inform my research.”
In the Online Classroom With Dr. Bylund
“The most important thing that I do in my teaching is find ways to help people connect what we’re talking about to their own experiences. So I use a lot of different examples. I like to have students engage with material and think about applying it to their own work.
“I find learning to be much better when I have a context for it: having examples and challenging students to think about how a certain principle, for instance, that we might be learning in the Fundamentals course applies to the work that they’re doing on a daily basis.
“Another important part of my teaching and education philosophy is that I want to create a safe learning environment where students feel like they can share ideas and questions without feeling that everything has to be said correctly.”
Who Needs an Implementation Science Certificate?
“UF’s implementation science certificate can be good for people in different career stages,” Dr. Bylund noted. “Some are practicing clinicians: nurses, nurse practitioners, physicians. They’re in a clinic and seeing how it can be difficult to translate research into practice. They do the certificate as a way of helping them focus their research in a specific area and see the [applicability] to what they’re doing.
“Another type of student that has a little bit of a different approach is one getting a graduate degree in another health-related field, like health promotion or health education and behavior. They see the importance of this to the work that they do and they take the certificate as something that’s complementary to it.”
Dr. Bylund affirmed that UF’s implementation science certificate isn’t just for clinicians or people in graduate programs.
“We also have people who’ve gotten their undergraduate degree and are working in a health-related field. For them, this is a way to upskill and develop an area of expertise that can help them in the work they’re doing, whether that be a nonprofit health organization, a government-affiliated public health organization or a pharmaceutical organization.
“Implementation science pretty much matters everywhere. There’s a lot of different ways that people might come to this.”
Ensuring a High Quality, Affordable, Engaging Online Program
So why should students choose UF’s online implementation science graduate program? Dr. Bylund had this to say:
“Probably the most important reason [to choose UF’s program] is we have great faculty who are doing really interesting work on implementation science in a variety of different healthcare and disease settings. Cancer treatment, cancer prevention, smoking cessation. Dr. Salloum’s doing work in Parkinson’s. Dr. Shenkman works in maternal morbidity. We’re a very affordable option for getting a postgraduate certificate.
“Also, we instructors try to be as available as possible for students through office hours and writing emails and communicating through Canvas. We really work hard to build that relationship with students in this asynchronous online environment.”
Join Dr. Bylund and other exceptional faculty and students in UF’s 11-credit online graduate program. Apply today!