ACGME Common Program Requirements state that, “Graduate medical education is the crucial step of professional development between medical school and autonomous clinical practice.” Despite this decree, advances in education, and trainee achievement of established milestones for competence, extensive literature as well as our own survey reveal starkly that new-to-practice physicians are perceived by supervisors, educational leaders, and themselves to lack essential attending level skills vital to successful transition from trainee to autonomous physician practice. While fellowship trainees have additional time to foster these skills, the vital subset of internal medicine residency graduates who pursue a career in general internal medicine depend on their residency programs and program directors to achieve this autonomy prior to transition to independent practice. It cannot be overemphasized that internal medicine residency is not just a pipeline to fellowship training and that focus must be recentered on actual tangible and relevant attending level skills and reinforced into the bedrock of the residency training foundation via high value educational experiences.
In this webinar, presenters will review findings from the literature addressing transition to practice and share results from our qualitative study of new-to-practice attendings and their supervisors to define gaps in readiness for practice. The group will highlight gaps that should be addressed in residency training and describe learning experiences to achieve this goal as well as share results from our pilot “pre-attending” rotation with lessons learned and exciting future directions.
Presenters: Timothy Kuchera, MD, Rebecca Jaffe, MD, Gretchen Diemer, MD, Jillian Zavodnick, MD