In 2016, a Castlight Health report named Wilmington, North Carolina, the city with the highest abuse opioid abuse rate in the US. In response, Joseph Pino, MD, MHA, and members of the community sought to safely reduce the number of opioids prescribed, increase adherence to best practices in opioid prescribing, and reduce emergency department visits due to opioid overdose. His poster, presented at the 2019 ACGME Annual Educational Conference, reports the outcome of these multiple initiatives.

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.

During a Featured Plenary at #ACGME2023 entitled Preparing Learners to Care for Patients and Communities Experiencing Substance Use Disorder, Charlene M. Dewey, MD, MEd, FACP, Stephen Loyd, MD, and Jeanette Tetrault, MD, FACP, FASAM discussed their unique experiences in treating and creating learning environments for physicians and other care practitioners to treat substance use disorder (SUD).

Dr. Eli Khazoum is the rising Chief Resident for the internal medicine residency program at Franciscan Health Olympia Fields in Olympia Fields, Illinois. He attended the 2023 ACGME Annual Educational Conference in part to support his transition into the Chief Resident role. As a resident and first-time Annual Educational Conference attendee, we asked him to share his impressions.

In the poster “Bolstering the Rural Physician Workforce in Underserved Communities: Are Rural Residency Planning and Development Programs Finding the Sweet Spot?” Emily M. Hawes, PharmD and her team used data about existing rural residency programs to identify potential sites for future programs. Dr. Hawes answered our questions on behalf of her team.

2023 GME Institutional Coordinator Excellence Awardee Bret Stevens, MBA, C-TAGME is the institutional coordinator for McLaren Health Care and the associate designated institutional official (DIO) for McLaren Oakland and McLaren St. Luke’s hospitals.

2023 GME Institutional Coordinator Excellence Awardee Leslie Caulder, MSML, C-TAGME, is the director, education and training programs, in the GME office at the University of Florida College of Medicine-Jacksonville.

2023 Parker J. Palmer Courage to Lead Awardee Dr. Kim Baker-Genaw is the designated institutional official (DIO) at Henry Ford Health in Detroit, Michigan.