This week's e-Communication includes news on the Milestones program, ACGME Requirements available for Review and Comment, new subspecialty proposals, calls for resident and public members, and more.

Bluefield Regional Medical Center in Bluefield, West Virginia will close inpatient and ancillary services by July 30, 2020. Eighteen residents will be displaced and the ACGME has opened ADS to aid with resident transfers. 

This is one in a series of project profiles of the ACGME’s Back to Bedside initiative, which empowers residents and fellows to develop innovations that foster meaning and joy in work and engage their patients on a deeper level.

At the 2021 ACGME Annual Educational Conference, Athena Gonzalez and her team presented their poster, Strategies for Optimizing Fit Testing for Residents and the Evolving Role of the Program Coordinator, about their work in response to the COVID-19 pandemic to ensure residents were wearing properly sized and fitted masks and respirators, even as supplies changed.

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.

2023 Parker J. Palmer Courage to Teach Awardee Dr. Timothy R. Long is a program director for anesthesiology and vice chair for education at Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota.

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.