Residents and Fellows

“Milestones” has been a part of the ACGME vocabulary for nearly 17 years now. In the final session of the 2018 Annual Educational Conference, Eric Holmboe, MD, MACP, FRCP, senior vice president, Milestone Development and Evaluation, kicked off a discussion about the Milestones today and the Milestones to come.

Jamie Dow, EdM, is assistant director for resident education and training at the University of Florida. Her poster, Mindfulness in Neurosurgery: Improving Neurosurgeon Wellness in Training and Beyond (with co-authors W. Christopher Fox, MD, Associate Program Director, University of Florida, and Gregory Murad, MD, Program Director, University of Florida), looked at wellness in neurosurgery, which Dow says “has traditionally been considered an oxymoron.” However, as priorities among neurological surgery residents evolve and the effects of physician burnout are increasingly recognized across specialties, life balance and overall well-being have become areas of emphasis and an opportunity for program improvement.

In one of the final sessions at the 2018 Annual Educational Conference on Sunday, March 4, a panel of ACGME executives, deans, a patient safety expert, and a resident spoke to the crowd about how medicine is changing and graduate medical education may need to evolve to serve patients well into the 21^st century.

Annual Educational Conference attendees looking for a stimulating discussion found all that and more at the featured plenary session, Achieving Health Equity with Dr. Camara Jones, on Friday morning. The session engaged attendees in various dimensions to issues they may not have been aware of, and reignited their energy and passion for issues they care about deeply.

Dr. Hedy Wald of Boston Children’s Hospital-Harvard Medical School and the Warren Alpert Medical School of Brown University was a first-time ACGME Annual Educational Conference attendee as a result of acceptance of her poster, Faculty Videos – An Innovation within Residency Resilience Skills Programs at Two Institutions, for presentation at the Poster Session. An avid social networker, she introduced herself to us at the Twitter Board on Thursday morning before the pre-conferences, and we continued the conversation throughout and after the conference. We asked Dr. Wald about her experience as a poster presenter and first-time attendee of our conference.

The ACGME’s and medical community’s prioritization of physician well-being made the issue a central of theme at the 2018 Annual Educational Conference. Gender-Specific Challenges in Burnout, a session led by speakers Carol Bernstein, MD and Kimberly Templeton, MD, explored a variety of factors that contribute specifically to the risk of burnout and differences between what men and women face in this arena.