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February 2016

Identifying Opportunities for Alignment in Pediatric Residency Training

Author Affiliations
  • 1Division of General Pediatrics, Department of Pediatrics, The Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
  • 2Perelman School of Medicine, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia
JAMA Pediatr. 2016;170(2):105-106. doi:10.1001/jamapediatrics.2015.3822

Residency training is at risk of becoming the equivalent of a family’s overstuffed basement. Keeping all that has accumulated over the years, the shelves have content from passionate and well-meaning stakeholders trying to add valued material. This could include everything from care for the febrile neonate to the proper operation of the hospital’s fire extinguishers. Board review questions to be reviewed on a smartphone while riding the elevator are wedged in next to mindfulness guidelines to ponder between overnight admissions. Logging duty hours is tacked onto a day filled with completing progress notes and performing an observed history and physical examination for evaluative and formative professional feedback. It is with the best of intentions that content, assessments, and structured feedback are added; there has never been enough time to prepare young pediatricians during their residency. But in this age of competence, compliance, and compassion, it is becoming increasingly clear that, as with the overflowing family basement, resident training does not have infinite capacity.

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