ACGME President and CEO Dr. Nasca kicked off his Saturday morning session at the Annual Educational Conference with some “non-rhetorical” questions: Can anyone predict what the health care system will look like in 2035? Can anyone predict how long your residents will practice? 40 years?

After stumping the room, he went on to explain that it is our job is to prepare residents to practice in the future—not to arm them with practices, skills, and knowledge of the present. We want our residents to be prepared not just for 2018 but for 2035—and beyond.

The 2019 ACGME Annual Educational Conference offers so many great educational opportunities that it can be hard to know which sessions to choose. One “must-attend” plenary session focuses on the critically important topic of physician well-being.

Registration for the 2019 Annual Educational Conference opens today! We are so excited to come together again as a community – the graduate medical education community – to share ideas and research, to network, to learn, to teach, to invigorate and inspire innovation, and to hear about all the ways that physician educators and physicians in training and the coordinators and administrators and leaders in their programs and institutions find Meaning in Medicine.

This week's e-Communication includes information on the new Guidance Statement regarding assessing residents and fellows during the COVID-19 pandemic, information on Accreditation Data System reports, and more.

Debra L. Dooley came to the ACGME 22 years ago, initially in an administrative role with the Review Committee for Internal Medicine. She retires today, after 10.5 years as the Director of Educational Activities, where she leads the team responsible for producing the ACGME’s educational programming, and most notably the Annual Educational Conference. We spent some time with her before she left, discussing her career, her mentors, her legacy, and the renaming of the Debra L. Dooley Program Coordinator Excellence Award.

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.

Linda B. Andrews, MD joined the ACGME leadership team in February 2019 as the new Senior Vice President, Field Activities. We chatted with Dr. Andrews to learn more about her background and her vision for Field Activities at the ACGME.

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.

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.