Essentials of Pediatric Emergency Medicine Fellowship Part 7: Careers in PEM

A Prospective Look at Career Aspirations Among Pediatric Emergency Medicine Trainees

OBJECTIVES

Before delivering a contract negotiation workshop to pediatric emergency medicine fellows in training, we wanted to understand the group's career aspirations. We hypothesized that fellows would be interested in nonclinical skill building in addition to the clinical training.

METHODS

A 9-question survey was anonymously administered to fellows registered for the national conference using SurveyMonkey before the conference date. Six questions were quantitative, 2 were qualitative and open ended, and 1 required ranking of elements.

RESULTS

Seventy-seven (47%) of the conference attendees responded to the survey, and approximately 80 (48%) attended the workshop session.Of the 77 fellows responding when asked about desired percentage of time per week devoted to the 4 categories of clinical, research, education, and administrative work within a 40-hour week, 76 (99%) chose the clinical category with an average of 58% of total hours devoted, 71 (92%) chose education with an average of 14% of total hours, 69 (90%) chose administration with an average of 8% of total hours, and 62 (81%) chose research with an average of 11% of total hours.Seventy attendees provided 1 sentence with the description of their ideal job. Thematic analysis of these responses revealed the following 5 main themes: academic potential, clinical environment, remuneration, job location, and work-life balance.

CONCLUSIONS

Diversification in pediatric emergency medicine training is becoming a growing area of importance. Our study highlights a discrepancy in the expected time dedicated for nonclinical activities from those seen in previous workforce studies.

Development of a Quality Improvement Curriculum in a Pediatric Emergency Medicine Fellowship

Quality improvement (QI) is a science of systematic analysis and improvement of health care delivery systems. Working knowledge of QI models is imperative to professional development of future pediatric emergency medicine practitioners. The Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education has established a list of QI and patient safety expectations for trainees. In order to address educational needs in this area, we have created a novel QI curriculum for pediatric emergency medicine fellows that include didactic sessions, active participation in QI projects, and mentorship by QI faculty. As a part of the curriculum, fellows are required to participate in variety of QI and patient safety activities, such as Morbidity and Mortality conferences, QI and Patient Case Review committees, and Clinical Care Guideline work groups. As a measure of success, fellows who have participated in this curriculum have shared their successful QI work at the local and national levels. This goal of this report is to share our experience in order to provide other institutions a framework for their own curriculum development.