2009 Southern Regional Meeting Abstracts

Purpose of Study: Designing a curriculum and demonstrating competency in the domain of professionalism is of utmost importance, as it is mandated by ACGME. Effectively teaching professionalism in pediatric residency programs has proven to be a challenging task. Our program designed a novel, longitudinal curriculum that has introduced important themes from the professionalism literature as well as provided our residents with a forum to share their thoughts and experiences about professionalism in a safe, supervised setting.
Methods Used: Due to residents’ busy schedules, multiple clinical sites, and a busy cadre of clinical professors, we needed to overcome significant obstacles. We opted to integrate this curriculum into the noon conference time, and to offer it quarterly. We divided all of our residents into groups of ten, spanning all levels of training. Each group is paired with one or two faculty members who went through a faculty development seminar introducing this curriculum. Using cases provided in the “Teaching and Assessing Professionalism: A Program Director’s Guide”, we aimed to address the following topics: Introduction to Professionalism, Professionalism and Clinical Care, Professionalism and Stress, and Professionalism and Society. Each session opens with a short description of the day’s topic. The faculty mentors are given a syllabus with themes for discussion and cases that can be addressed. The residents are encouraged to bring up their own cases and experiences for discussion. Additionally, each resident is encouraged to write a reflective piece that they may chose to share.
Summary of Results: During the first year of this course, participants were asked to write down what they “took away” from each session, which is in the process of analysis. Each year the curriculum for the professionalism small groups will stay the same with the hopes that residents and faculty have the opportunity to continue this dialogue over time. We have already received verbal feedback that both the residents and faculty have found these sessions valuable for their professional growth.
Conclusions: Integrating professionalism longitudinally into our residency program was quite successful. Additionally, this curriculum satisfy's the ACGME's reflective practice requirements. Many residencies could easily implement similar program into their core curriculum.