As part of the ALiEM Faculty Incubator Program, Dr. Mike Callaham (Editor-in-Chief of Annals of Emergency Medicine) and Dr. Ellen Weber (Editor-in-Chief of Emergency Medicine Journal) participated in a Google Hangout where they provided expert advice on academic writing and peer review. We have summarized their wisdom below.
The Essentials of Emergency Medicine (EEM) conference is in May 2017, but opportunities start NOW. This conference is one of the largest live EM educational conferences in the world with over 2,000 attendees. The conference organizers, led by Dr. Paul Jhun, are again offering an amazing opportunity for U.S. EM residents to serve as an EEM Fellow for the next EEM conference in May 16-18, 2017.
Ever wish you could get Continuing Medical Education (CME) credit for the Free Open Access Meducation (FOAM) you already consume? We are excited to announce that 10 ALiEM articles are now available for AMA PRA Category 1 CME. This is a pilot program in collaboration with FOAMbase and EB Medicine. There is great content on trauma, geriatrics, pediatrics, critical care, and more. We think CME for FOAM is going to be a great way to increase sustainability for FOAM authors while keeping FOAM 100% free and open access.
The first question people ask when they hear about the new FemInEM job board is “Why would you have a job board just for women?” I smile briefly, and then I explain. The FemInEM job board is for ALL doctors in EM. I understand the confusion, after all, we are a website dedicated to discussing and discovering issues related to women working in emergency medicine. We publish articles on gender bias in the workplace, reflect on the needs of new mothers returning from maternity leave and discuss programs that help women become leaders in our field. And since we spend so much time discussing environments conducive to the success of women physicians, it seemed natural for us to provide a forum where our readers could look for new jobs.
The issues of wellness, burnout, and resiliency have snowballed across nearly all health professions. Emergency Medicine (EM) specifically was singled out as one of the specialties with highest risk for burnout at >60%.1 There has been much discussion around the general “UN-wellness” of medicine, and we now feel that there is a dire need for action. Instead of tackling the entire spectrum of wellness throughout medicine, we wanted to focus on EM residents. As a response to this need, we are proud to announce the launch of the ALiEM Wellness Think Tank, which is a private virtual community comprised of EM residents across North America. What better stakeholder group to address the world of EM residency wellness than EM residents themselves?
With the start of the year, we welcomed a new group of faces into our respective residency programs. We can all still remember how daunting it was to tackle learning the immense volume of material to be a great emergency medicine physician. We have so many amazing resources, but no road maps for where to start. The purpose of this list is to help guide the new interns as well as to highlight some resources that even the more seasoned clinician may find useful.
One of the most difficult parts of residency and medical education is coordination and communication. Often residents and faculty alike can be found drowning in a never ending onslaught of emails, with chains of projects getting buried amongst reply-all’s and attachments. Over the course of the past year, our residency program at Doctors Hospital-OhioHealth in Columbus, Ohio has been using a newer form of communication to facilitate the dissemination of information and collaboration as a group.
After some initial exploration into technology and apps, it was decided to try out the program called Slack. Designed to help large groups work together as well as separately on projects simultaneously, we felt this may be our solution to the clunky and at times unbearable onslaught of emails. For those of you interested in taking your residency or group to the next level, below are our observations from the past year in a simple do’s and dont’s fashion.