Background: Specialty clinics can be challenging for students on the internal medicine clerkship. They often lack the specialized knowledge necessary to fully engage in the clinic and may be pushed into an observational role, rather than being afforded meaningful opportunities. These peripheral roles undermine self-efficacy, and, therefore, education and interest.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground Medical educators face many challenges, including the absence of defined roles, lack of standard career paths, and limited support in systems that generally prioritize research and clinical productivity over educational activities. Providers also teach to widely varying degrees. This study was designed to specifically examine the professional rewards and obstacles experienced by physicians who have dedicated significant energy and career focus to medical education.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground And Objectives: Entrustable professional activities (EPAs) will be used for initial certification by the American Board of Pediatrics by 2028. Less than half of pediatric fellowships currently use EPAs for assessment, yet all will need to adopt them. Our objectives were to identify facilitators and barriers to the implementation of EPAs to assess pediatric fellows and to determine fellowship program directors' (FPD) perceptions of EPAs and Milestones.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: Minimal research has explored the pandemic's impact on health professions educators (HPEs). Given that health professions educator academies provide centralised support and professional development to HPEs through communities of practice and promoting education at their institutions, it is important to examine how academies met HPEs' needs during the pandemic. This study investigates the COVID-19 pandemic's effects on HPEs and examines how academies supported HPEs' educational roles during the pandemic.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFPediatric fellowship programs have conducted virtual interviews since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020. In this national survey of fellowship program directors and fellows interviewed in-person and virtually, fellowship program directors and fellows formed accurate impressions, regardless of format, but our data did not clearly support one interview format over another.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFProblem: Interprofessional education (IPE) is valued but difficult to deliver, given logistical and other barriers. Centering IPE around patients and grounding it in authentic practice settings are challenging within early undergraduate medical education.
Approach: This intervention facilitated student-patient conversations to elicit patient reflections on the health care professionals who keep them healthy and care for them when they are unwell.
Background: Entrustable Professional Activities (EPA) and competencies represent components of a competency-based education framework. EPAs are assessed based on the level of supervision (LOS) necessary to perform the activity safely and effectively. The broad competencies, broken down into narrower subcompetencies, are assessed using milestones, observable behaviors of one's abilities along a developmental spectrum.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFPediatr Blood Cancer
April 2023
The pediatric hematology and oncology (PHO) workforce landscape has been evolving over the past decades, with concern for waning interest in the subspecialty. We aimed to evaluate the impact of the initial PHO job search on fellow stress and anxiety, in addition to perceptions of the job search experience and potential areas of improvement. An anonymous survey consisting of demographics, emotional health impacts such as stress and anxiety, and job search experiences was developed and distributed to program leadership at all 74 PHO fellowship programs.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFSingle-pulse transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) of the precentral hand representation (M1) can elicit indirect waves in the corticospinal tract at a periodicity of ∼660 Hz, called I-waves. These descending volleys are produced by transsynaptic excitation of fast-conducting corticospinal axons in M1. Paired-pulse TMS can induce short-interval intracortical facilitation (SICF) of motor evoked potentials (MEPs) at interpulse intervals that match I-wave periodicity.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: Physicians' behavior may unknowingly be impacted by prejudice and thereby contribute to healthcare inequities. Despite increasingly robust data demonstrating physician implicit bias (The Office of Minority Health. Minority Population Profiles, 2021; COVID-19 Shines Light on Health Disparities, National Conference of State Legislatures 2021), the evidence behind how to change this with training programs remains unclear.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFTranscranial (electro)magnetic stimulation (TMS) is currently the method of choice to non-invasively induce neural activity in the human brain. A single transcranial stimulus induces a time-varying electric field in the brain that may evoke action potentials in cortical neurons. The spatial relationship between the locally induced electric field and the stimulated neurons determines axonal depolarization.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: The impact of the coronavirus 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic on the emotional health of health care workers continues to be an area of active research. However, few studies have focused on those working in pediatrics and its subspecialties, as well as ancillary and non-patient-facing staff. The purpose of this study was to determine the prevalence and associated predictors of burnout and emotional well-being of providers and staff.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFIntroduction: Safe, patient-centered, and cost-effective care requires effective collaboration within interprofessional teams. Education programs for health care professionals are often siloed, providing students with limited interprofessional education (IPE) opportunities to learn from, with, and about other professions. Podcasts offer a novel approach to facilitate IPE, allowing for asynchronous conversations with interprofessional colleagues.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFObjective: The Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons of Canada (RCPSC) recently redesigned the Canadian neurosurgery residency training curriculum by implementing a competency-based model of training known as Competence by Design (CBD) centered around the assessment of Entrustable Professional Activities (EPAs). This sequential explanatory mixed-methods study evaluated potential benefits and pitfalls of CBD in Canadian neurosurgery residency education.
Methods: Two four-month interval surveys were distributed to all Canadian neurosurgery residents participating in CBD.
Background And Objectives: Entrustable Professional Activities (EPAs) were developed to assess pediatric fellows. We previously showed that fellowship program directors (FPDs) may graduate fellows who still require supervision. How this compares with their expectations for entrustment of practicing subspecialists is unknown.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFPurpose: Entrustable professional activities (EPAs) are one approach to competency-based medical education (CBME), and 7 EPAs have been developed that address content relevant for all pediatric subspecialties. However, it is not known what level of supervision fellowship program directors (FPDs) deem necessary for graduation. The Subspecialty Pediatrics Investigator Network (SPIN) investigated FPD perceptions of the minimum level of supervision required for a trainee to successfully graduate.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFJ Contin Educ Health Prof
April 2021
As a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, the Harvard Medical School Master of Medical Sciences in Medical Education program implemented the Plus/Delta debriefing model to collect real-time learner feedback and facilitate continuous quality improvement within our assessment and program evaluation module, which rapidly transitioned online. The model is grounded in quality improvement methodology and encourages bidirectional rather than top-down feedback. Learners identified specifically what went well with each module session (Plus) and how to improve for the next time (Delta).
View Article and Find Full Text PDFInterprofessional trust is essential for effective team-based care. Medical students are transient members of clinical teams during clerkship rotations and there may be limited focus on developing competency in interprofessional collaboration. Within a pediatric clerkship rotation, we developed a novel simulation activity involving an interprofessional conflict, aiming to foster trusting interprofessional relationships.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFObjectives: Fellowship program directors (FPD) and Clinical Competency Committees (CCCs) both assess fellow performance. We examined the association of entrustment levels determined by the FPD with those of the CCC for 6 common pediatric subspecialty entrustable professional activities (EPAs), hypothesizing there would be strong correlation and minimal bias between these raters.
Methods: The FPDs and CCCs separately assigned a level of supervision to each of their fellows for 6 common pediatric subspecialty EPAs.