Academic medicine : journal of the Association of American Medical Colleges
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Women represent approximately half of students entering medical schools and more than half of those entering PhD programs. When advancing through the academic and professional fields, however, women continually face barriers that men do not. ⋯ Specific areas of focus outlined by the authors include facilitating women's access to formal and informal professional networks, acknowledging and addressing the gender pay gap as well as the lack of research funding awarded to women in the field, and updating workplace policies that have not evolved to accommodate women's lifestyles. As academic institutions seek access to top talent and the means to develop those individuals capable of generating the change medicine and science needs, the authors urge leaders and change agents within academic medicine to address the systemic barriers to gender equity that impede us from achieving the mission to improve the health of all.
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Over the past 25 years, the number of women graduating from medical schools in the United States and Canada has increased dramatically to the point where roughly equal numbers of men and women are graduating each year. Despite this growth, women continue to face challenges in moving into academic leadership positions. ⋯ They provide brief synopses of current literature on the personal and social forces that affect women's participation in academic leadership roles. They are persuaded that a deeper understanding of these realities can help create an environment in academic medicine that is generally more supportive of women's participation, and that specifically encourages women in medicine to take on academic leadership positions.
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Much work remains to be done to align the diversity of the health care workforce with the changing racial and ethnic backgrounds of patients, especially in the field of emergency medicine. ⋯ Additional studies are needed to determine whether these results are sustainable and generalizable to other residency programs in emergency medicine and other specialties.
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African Americans remain substantially less likely than other physicians to hold academic appointments. The roots of these disparities stem from different extrinsic and intrinsic forces that guide career development. Efforts to ameliorate African American underrepresentation in academic medicine have traditionally focused on modifying structural and extrinsic barriers through undergraduate and graduate outreach, diversity and inclusion initiatives at medical schools, and faculty development programs. ⋯ Intrinsic motivations introduced by race-conscious professionalism complicate efforts to increase the representation of minorities in academic medicine. For many African American physicians, a desire to have their work focused on the community will be at odds with traditional paths to professional advancement. Specific policy options are discussed that would leverage race-conscious professionalism as a draw to a career in academic medicine, rather than a force that diverts commitment elsewhere.
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The Next Accreditation System requires internal medicine training programs to provide the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education (ACGME) with semiannual information about each resident's progress in 22 subcompetency domains. Evaluation of resident "trustworthiness" in performing entrustable professional activities (EPAs) may offer a more tangible assessment construct than evaluations based on expectations of usual progression toward competence. However, translating results from EPA-based evaluations into ACGME milestone progress reports has proven to be challenging because the constructs that underlay these two systems differ. ⋯ As faculty members complete EPA-based evaluations, the mapped milestone elements are automatically marked as "confirmed." Programs can maintain a database that tallies the number of times each milestone element is confirmed for a resident; these data can be used to produce graphical displays of resident progress along the internal medicine milestones. Using this count of milestone elements allows programs to bridge the gap between faculty assessments of residents based on rotation-specific observed activities and semiannual ACGME reports based on the internal medicine milestones. Although potentially useful for all programs, this method is especially beneficial to large programs where clinical competency committee members may not have the opportunity for direct observation of all residents.