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.

The Annual Educational Conference not only facilitates great collegiality and networking, but also allows you to connect with ACGME leaders and staff members, to get detailed answers to your questions or simply to put a face with an email address.

Parker J. Palmer Courage to Teach Awardee Lisa Willett, MD, MACM, is the internal medicine residency program director and vice chair for education in the Department of Medicine at the University of Alabama at Birmingham.

Welcome to the new academic year! As thousands of new residents begin their journey toward independent practice this month, we asked Jeff Dewey, MD, former resident member of the Review Committee for Neurology, to reflect on his experiences in residency and share lessons he learned.

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.

As a new academic year approaches, it is important to continue breaking the silence surrounding clinician burnout. During a highly emotional and personal panel discussion at the 2019 ACGME Annual Educational Conference in March, Dr. Nasca and colleagues from other national organizations in medicine discussed how burnout and self-doubt touched their lives. Influenced by those experiences and others throughout his career, Dr. Nasca has positioned the ACGME to help lead the charge to address physician well-being.

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.