Do you have 27 projects up in the air but none of them submitted for publication yet? (Guilty!) Have a great project in the works but can’t get past one sticky detail? (Been there!) Need help navigating a finicky IRB? (Yuck!) CV just looking a little threadbare? (Hangs head in shame.) You need a Works-in-Progress (WIP) meeting!
Welcome to season 3, episode 2 of the ALiEM Medical Education in Cases (MEdIC) series! Our team (Brent Thoma, Sarah Luckett-Gatopoulos, Tamara McColl, Eve Purdy, and Teresa Chan) is pleased to welcome you to our online community of practice where we discuss difficult medical education cases each month. As usual, the community discussion will be reviewed using qualitative research methods to produce a curated summary that will be combined with two expert responses to create a functional teaching resource.
This month’s case features a problem that many of us have seen in our day-to-day practice: a patient with a strict no learner policy who refuses to be assessed by anyone other than the attending physician. With much of the care in teaching hospitals delegated through fellows, residents, and medical students at various stages of training, how would you address this problem? Please read the case and join in the discussion below!
If you are a 4th year medical student, chances are that interviews are taking up much of your time and thought right now. Interviews can be stressful, especially when your future job is at stake and in the hands of the somewhat mysterious match process. How can you set yourself apart from hundreds of other applicants as someone who is a good fit for a program, who should be ranked highly, and who will be a great future resident – all in the course of a 15 minute interview? This post will walk you through some important “Dos” to make you stand out, and some devastating “Don’ts” that can sink you down lower on a program’s rank list.
We are very excited to present a special installment of the ALiEM Journal Club in collaboration with FeminEM featuring the JAMA article by Jena et al. entitled “Sex Differences in Academic Rank in U.S. Medical Schools in 2014.” 1 Despite correcting for a multitude of metrics such as time since residency completion and research productivity, women remain substantially less likely to attain the rank of full professor at academic centers. To many, this article’s conclusions come as no surprise. This journal club is meant to inspire discussion around gender disparities and brainstorm solutions of equality for all involved in academic medicine.
They started at once, and went about among the Lotus-eaters, who did them no hurt, but gave them to eat of the lotus, which was so delicious that those who ate of it left off caring about home, and did not even want to go back and say what had happened to them, but were for staying and munching lotus with the Lotus-eaters without thinking further of their return.
— Odyssey IX, translated by Samuel Butler
Subspecialty training within emergency medicine is increasingly becoming a popular route for those interested in pursuing an academic faculty position. This year, we will cover the ins-and-outs, nuts-and-bolts, and nuances for 3 fellowships available to EM residency graduates: Simulation, Toxicology, and Ultrasound. Modeled after the wildly successful EM Match Advice for medical students applying to residency, Dr. Mike Gisondi launches and hosts another successful series — the EM Fellowship Match Advice series.
“If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.”
As colleagues in Emergency Medicine (EM) and education we can trace both our roots and see our branches. For many of us, including the bloggers, podcasters, mythbusters, and the skeptics can trace our journey back to Dr. Jerry Hoffman. Dr. Hoffman is internationally known as one of the founders of EM, the lead author of the NEXUS study, one of the hosts of EM abstracts, and the original EM skeptic. It is our distinct pleasure to have Dr. Hoffman contribute to this ALiEM bookclub series.