Dr. Chinelo Okigbo is a PGY-3 Internal Medicine Chief Resident at AtlantiCare Regional Medical Center in New Jersey. She attended the 2019 ACGME Annual Educational Conference as part of the Back to Bedside initiative. As a resident and first-time Annual Educational Conference attendee, we asked her to share her impressions based on her experience.

During their presentation “Using Public Data to Follow Graduates into Practice,” at the 2019 Annual Educational Conference, Marc M. Triola, MD and Patrick M. Cocks, MD, from the NYU School of Medicine have leveraged large databases of publicly available information to help understand the patterns of health care practice and outcomes among graduates from programs once they have left the programs.

John Madara, MD wanted to find a way to improve incoming residents’ ability to identify and mitigate patient safety hazards, address these hazards through teamwork and collaboration, and report safety events using an online event reporting system. Dr. Madara, the chief fellow in pulmonary and critical care medicine at Thomas Jefferson University Hospital, Willow Grove, Pennsylvania, worked with others to create an interactive, competitive “escape room” themed environment to stimulate learning and teamwork. His poster, Patient Safety Escape!: Engaging Residents in Patient Safety Education and Event Reporting, reports on the activity and its effectiveness in teaching residents about patient safety and online reporting procedures.

A panel of institutional representatives and ACGME leaders discussed the successes and challenges of actively involving residents in patient safety improvement as part of the ACGME’s Pursuing Excellence in Clinical Learning Environments (Pursuing Excellence) initiative. The panel convened at a sunset session at the 2019 ACGME Annual Educational Conference.

Lauren Wojnarowski, MA is the ACGME's Associate Director, Educational Projects, working in the Education Department's Educational Activities team. She is one of the planners of the Annual Educational Conference, and her team's role is to handle collection of educational content and logistics (besides AV) to produce the conference each year. We asked her to share some more about her role and what the conference experience is like for her behind the scenes.

Dr. Ashraf Mohamed El Ghul, is the designated institutional official (DIO) and Internal Medicine Residency Program Director at Mafraq Hospital in Abu Dhabi in the United Arab Emirates (UAE). His institution’s and program’s experience with ACGME International brought him to the 2019 ACGME Annual Educational Conference and we asked him to share his experience.

This week's e-Communication includes information on the Annual Educational Conference Calls for Sessions,  and Review and Comment opportunities. 

This special edition of the ACGME's weekly e-Communication includes a statement honoring the sacrifices of frontline caregivers, new Frequently Asked Questions, and news from Milestones and the Journal of Graduate Medical Education.

2020 ACGME Parker J. Palmer Courage to Teach Awardee Robyn Blair, MD is the program director for pediatrics at the Renaissance School of Medicine at Stony Brook University, Stony Brook Children's Hospital.