2009 Program Directors' Workshop

Ron, Dr. Triana and I enjoyed a great PDW the last few days. We'll be coming home with some new ideas, some renewed and some new connections with our colleagues across the country and with renewed energy.

I especially enjoyed the opening plenary by our STFM president, Terry Steyer. It included a quote from President Obama that went in part like this... "we are the change we seek." That charge came through in many of the sessions I attended and particularly resonated with me because of our ongoing recovery efforts post hurricane Ike. If we don't take advantage of the opportunity within this challenge, we will have done ourselves and our program a great disservice.

This is an exciting time for Family Medicine nationally and that topic was central to the conference this year. It has been a long time since I've seen such energy and enthusiasm about the future of Family Medicine. The upcoming years are really going to be exciting times to be part of the Family Medicine family.

Other highlights from the conference for me...

A couple of great sessions on Leadership and a poster that inspired some thoughts the Residency leadership team will be discussing and implementing in the coming weeks and months. I'm also thinking about developing a FM Leadership/Advocacy elective to offer for our residents. That could also easily be an Area of Concentration, but I'll start with the elective as a good first step! Email me if that interests you.

PGY1 --> PGY2 promotion - saw a great example of some evaluation tools and a formal specifically targeted process for assessing readiness to promote. We will be doing something with a version of this modified for our program as well.

Electives: we need an elective database that includes info on electives that our residents have done. No need to completely re-invent the wheel every time and we could simplify the "who to contact to begin the process" part with a database. Also, Dr. Triana and I attended a curriculum session that included as one part an innovation that has a lot of potential for our program, so be looking forward to upcoming discussions about this. The innovation was moving all six electives to the second half of PGY3. I can think of many potential advantages and a few challenges we would have to work through to make it work. But there are enough advantages that we're at least going to seriously consider it. (Except for our DO residents, because the AOA requires one elective in PGY1, so the DO PGY3 residents would have a 5 block stretch of electives.)

Another curriculum innovation by this program is to structure the second month of emergency medicine longitudinally in PGY2 and PGY3, requiring 6 shifts in each year, done on Friday nights on rotations where the duty hours will allow. This frees up a whole additional rotation block for some other content.

From the ABFM... the ITE will be offered as a computer based exam ONLY by 2013.

From the RRC... a major revision of the program requirements is about to commence. This is especially exciting because required rotations will be critically evaluated and I believe the opportunity for restructuring our required experiences is truly coming. Dr. Ed Bope suggested his version during his plenary... there were a total of SIX program requirements (!!! for reference, I think the current program requirements are about 35 - 45 pages!) and I'll look up his slides to post these later!

One plenary session was devoted to the Patient Centered Medical Home. I learned that "cycle time" (when the patient walks in the door to when the patient walks out the door) is good proxy for practice organization and should be <60 href="http://www.aafp.org">AAFP just posted a PCMH checklist. I plan to use this checklist as a survey for our residents and faculty and use it as information and evidence for obtaining the resources we need in our clinic. Go ahead and print it off, fill it out and drop by my office if you'd like. Please put your name on it, only so I can keep track of who has done it and who hasn't. You won't hurt my feelings with your answers!

I attended a great session on the PD-Program Coordinator team and relationship. I think Linda and I are generally doing pretty well with this, but I will review the content with her and check my own perceptions to be sure she feels the same way. There are a few things from that session that we can work on too.

One session I attended was about Leadership and Life Balance. The speaker (Lee Lipsenthal) is really great and gave us a CD that I believe contains one of his talks. Residents can look forward to hearing this at an upcoming didactic session.

Overall, this year's PDW was very beneficial and we'll be bringing home some exciting ideas!