Family medicine
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COVID-19 Exposure Risk, Burnout, and Shifts in Family Medicine Faculty's Efforts: A National Survey.
In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, academic family physicians had to change their clinical, teaching, research, and administrative efforts, while simultaneously balancing their home environment demands. It is unclear how the changes in effort affected physicians' personal well-being, particularly burnout. This study sought to identify changes in faculty's clinical, teaching, research, and administrative efforts during the COVID-19 pandemic and how effort shifts were associated with burnout. We also examined associations with important demographics and burnout. ⋯ Shifts in effort across academic family physicians' multiple roles were associated with emotional exhaustion and, to a lesser degree, depersonalization. The high rates of burnout demand additional attention from directors and administrators, especially among female physicians.
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Racial/ethnic score disparities on standardized tests are well documented. Such differences on the American Board of Family Medicine (ABFM) certification examination have not been previously reported. If such differences exist, it could be due to differences in knowledge at the beginning of residency or due to variations in the rate of knowledge acquisition during residency. Our objective was to examine the residents' mean initial scores and score trajectories using the In-Training Examination (ITE) and certification examination. ⋯ This study found that there were initial score disparities across race/ethnicity groups in PGY-1, and these disparities continued at the same rate throughout residency training, suggesting equality in acquisition of knowledge during family medicine residency training but with a persistent gap throughout training.
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Medical students face difficult transitions throughout their training that increase their risk of burnout. Resiliency training may prepare students to better face the demands of their medical careers. This project is an initial investigation into medical students' long-term utilization of learned resiliency skills. ⋯ This work adds to the existing literature regarding participants' valuation of novel resilience curricula. Students utilized the skills learned in ART as long as 18 months after completing the program. More study evaluating the specific effects of ART on traditional measures of resilience such as the Brief Resilience Scale (BRS) is needed.
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HIV preexposure prophylaxis (PrEP) has been purposefully incorporated into our family medicine resident training within existing didactic lectures, readings, and routine office visit precepting. This mixed-methods evaluation assesses training strategies for PrEP use via survey and drug use evaluation (DUE). ⋯ Residents rated precepting as the most effective training. However, DUE demonstrated that PrEP underuse, as well as suboptimal testing, limited experiential training on CDC guidelines. Curricular updates should further emphasize appropriate patient selection for PrEP, including women, minorities, and PWID, as well as robust testing, to continue expanding PrEP access.
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The Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education (ACGME) has implemented milestones for progression of residents. Career academic physicians would benefit from similar concrete guidance for scholarly activity and faculty development. After developing milestones across six recognized competencies among our family medicine academicians, we acknowledged the potential benefit of expanding the development of milestones throughout the academic medical center. ⋯ This rubric can be helpful for directing faculty development and faculty mentorship. These milestones are general enough that other physician specialties may be able to adopt them for their own needs.