The ACGME has been working with Chicago-based Hope For The Day for over a year, and we are thrilled to announce the ACGME is now a Hope For The Day Partner in Prevention, actively working towards mental health education and proactive suicide prevention.

With overdose as the leading cause of death for Americans under 50, it is imperative that the nation—including the entire medical community—take responsibility for its role in creating this epidemic and identify and enact strategies that can address it. This is Dr. Leana Wen’s position. The former Baltimore Health Commissioner and current president of Planned Parenthood spoke about the steps she and the City of Baltimore took to address opioid addiction in the community, and what role she sees physicians playing in solving this problem that is devastating the nation.

Associate Program Director Kimberly Collins, MD of Johns Hopkins All Children's Hospital in Saint Petersburg, Florida set out to see how simulating conversations about social determinants of health (as opposed to in-class learning or immersion-based training) affected a resident’s or fellow’s ability to broach and explore these complex, often sensitive, subjects with patients and their parents. Her results are recorded in her poster: Improving Resident Comfort with Discussing Social Determinants of Health through Simulation.

John V. Pamula, MD, FACP, led a quality improvement project focused on reducing burnout and increasing well-being among its residents. His poster, Multipronged Strategies to Improve Wellbeing and Work-Life Balance of Residents, was presented at the 2019 Annual Educational Conference, Engaging Each Other: Rediscovering Meaning in Medicine.

Training physicians in the science of compassion not only makes for more caring physicians, it improves their abilities as clinicians and may help prevent burnout, said Dominic O. Vachon, MDiv, PhD during his Baldwin Seminar Series presentation at the ACGME offices May 22, 2019.

As part of its commitment to staff and community well-being, the ACGME is partnering with Hope For The Day, a Chicago-based non-profit organization dedicated to mental health support and suicide prevention.

Drs. Lyuba Konopasek, Stuart Slavin, and Timothy Brigham walked participants through the ACGME-developed guidebook, “Well-Being in the Time of COVID-19,” and explored how the ideas within it could be implemented in graduate medical education in their 2021 ACGME Annual Educational Conference session.

2021 Parker J. Palmer Courage to Teach Awardee Joanne Valeriano-Marcet, MD is the rheumatology program director at University of South Florida Morsani College of Medicine.

Nick Yaghmour is the Associate Director for Well-Being and Milestones Research at the ACGME. We asked him about his experience with the conference, his role, and what else he's working on.