Present: Miriam Bar-on, Laura Degnon, Tom George, Jose Gonzalez, Susan Guralnick, Marty Weisse, and Cliff Yu
First congratulations to Jenny on the birth of her first child, a baby girl, 3 days of age. Needless to say, Jenny just called to say hello and volunteer her services.
The plan of the call was to first discuss the action items generated at the May meeting.
- The group wanted to send a proposal to the council of taskforce chairs to incorporate the faculty development topics offered at the annual meeting with the APA's faculty development initiative. This was not done. However, the discussion focused on the presentation of PAS workshops more than one time to include the APPD meeting as one of the sessions and/or to have APPD faculty present workshops that would count as part of the APA Faculty Development certification. Connie Baldwin is the contact person for this initiative and Cliff will contact her to see if this can happen.
In addition, beginning in 2005, the APPD is looking to give CME credits for attending the annual meeting. This may give credence to the APPD workshops being counted for the APA FD certification.
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Action: Cliff will contact Connie Baldwin and report back to the group.
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- The goal was to develop products for academic achievement. Discussion focused on how to accomplish this task in a variety of different modalities. After discussing that there is a difference between workshops for academic achievement and those for improving one's program, the group made the following suggestions:
- Workshops at the annual meeting to either be given in concert with the other workshops or as a preconference workshop aimed at mid-level career folks.
- Topics would include developing new skills to make being PD exciting and something to do over an extended period of time.
- Also there was talk to make one workshop focus on burnout and avoiding it, especially in the current time with all the required changes such as 80 hour work week, competencies, etc.
- Workshops at the fall meeting are already being done to help new program directors realize that academic achievement can be attained even as a PD.
| Action: Group will submit a workshop proposal aimed at midlevel career PD's and have it compete with the rest of the workshops as an intro this year and possibly extend it to a preconference workshop at the 2006 meeting. |
- A proposal was not presented to have the faculty development taskforce select or help select workshops for the annual meeting in the area of FD. We discussed asking the board to help allow us to do this and have the specific FD workshops culled out and let the group read them and score them or in turn, have 2 specific workshops "sponsored" by the taskforce.
| Action: Susan was going to talk to the board about these ideas, and Laura was going to put it on the agenda for the next board conference call. |
- Pediatrics 101: Pediatrics 101. There was lengthy conversation about the publication. Much of the discussion revolved around the point and mission of the publication.
- Cliff's comments included: who is the target audience? Does it address the needs of the audience? If it should focus on the medical student, the publication should be more in depth.
- Marty's comments included: if the focus is on choosing a residency program, the booklet overvalues large programs and undervalues small programs. The links provided didn't get you where you should be. Overall, they were poor and the only one that was worthwhile was APPD.org. Most programs have their own site and perhaps, there should be a way to access the addresses of the various programs' sites.
- Jose's comments included: agree with both Cliff and Marty, that the booklet had too much information in too generalized a manner. What should this booklet achieve? Perhaps a site for peds as a career should have a different website than becoming a doctor and peds is part of medicine.
- Mimi's comments included: agree with what has been said. Needs to be introduced to target students early and get them thinking about peds.
The group decided that major reorganization of the booklet needed to be done. It was suggested that perhaps the following organization should be done:
- Peds 101: for medical school
- Peds 201: for residency selection
- Peds 301: for after residency i.e. different types of practice and fellowship
| Action: Cliff and Marty will work on reorganization and have a proposal for the group. Deadline was not given, however, this could be a product for the spring meeting if achieved. |
- New program director lunch - this was thought to be better as a mentor-mentee luncheon. There could be an informal pairing of folks ahead of time so that there could be initial contact prior to the meeting. People could then think about specific issues that they wanted to discuss with their mentor. The first step would be polling the "senior" (defined as PD > 5 years) members of the APPD to determine if there were enough folks willing to serve as mentors. If there was enough of a sample, then there could be a "call" for folks wanting a mentor, perhaps something added to the registration form. Folks could then be paired a head of time, i.e. similar geographic location, similar sized programs, similar ideology, etc.
| Action: We will poll folks who have been PDs more than 5 years (info from the data base) and ask if they would be willing to be mentors. Laura will get a list of PDs who meet this criteria and Mimi will set up a quick questionnaire requesting mentors. |
- Workshop on political activism. It was thought that the AAP did a good job of this. Perhaps submission of a workshop to the group to see if there was interest in incorporating this information into one's program was discussed. Question of whether this would be a sponsored workshop by the taskforce, or in the future a pre-conference workshop. Further discussion is needed to determine the direction to take with this.
| Action: Survey the taskforce to determine if there is interest in submitting a workshop application on political activism and how to introduce it into one's program to further support GME activities, especially for M/P and training at free standing children's hospitals. |
- Administrative support: a fair amount of discussion at the May meeting focused around this particular issue. The latest version of the RRC requirements addresses the groups issues in sufficient detail. Additional feedback can be found on the web in the section devoted to the support for programs and program directors.
- Listserv issues, thought that discussion on the listserv has not been robust. Since the development of the new web based discussion on hot topics, discussion has been significant and the TF will follow the trend of the discussions. Laura mentioned that a new topic cannot be randomly posted and that new postings have to go through the central office.
- NEW- format of the meeting again is going to change.
- Thursday will include the SIG and the plenary
- Friday will be workshops and posters
- Saturday will include the various forums such as the one for small programs etc.
This year there will be no opportunity for a pre-conference workshop, however, it should be considered that the TF submit a workshop for professional development for mid-career PDs. This should be submitted to compete with other workshops.
There was also some discussion on workshops focusing on the new program requirements and potentially having poster symposia to include the most information as possibly especially on the competencies and some of the other new requirements.
| Action: We will have a call for volunteers from the taskforce to put together workshops on professional development for the mid-career program director. Volunteers can let Mimi know ASAP if they are interested. If there is more than one member of the task force interested, we can either have collaboration or individual submissions and then blindly review them and submit the two best. |
The call concluded with the hope that others would join next time and that we can have a couple of deliverable products to the organization at the time of the spring meeting. We will be having 3 more conference calls, one in November, one in February and one in March-April to further discuss our goals and plans.
| Action: Please let Mimi know the best times for a call, morning or afternoon, day of the week etc. She will try to accommodate as many as possible in arranging the next call. |
Thanks to all that participated in this call.
Respectfully submitted,
Miriam Bar-on
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