Background: Nationally, graduated pediatric hospital medicine fellows have reported inadequate competence in research, education, quality improvement, business practice, and leadership skills. However, most fellows enter academic jobs that require proficiency in these areas. A professional development curriculum may help better prepare fellows to enter the workforce. Our objective was to develop a framework for a pediatric hospital medicine fellow professional development curriculum.
Methods: We used the mixed-method group concept mapping methodology. We invited all members of our division to participate. We organized volunteers into four brainstorming sessions with the prompt, “What topics should be included in a pediatric hospital medicine fellowship professional development curriculum?” Participants generated statements during sessions, then asynchronously sorted statements conceptually into piles and rated the importance and feasibility of each on a scale from 1 (least) to 5 (most). We used the RCMap package in R to generate clusters based on the participant-created piles.
Results: During brainstorming, 14 academic hospitalists, two hybrid academic-community hospitalists, one community hospitalist, one nurse practitioner, and one fellow generated 73 unique statements. All but two participants both sorted and ranked statements. Participants identified 12 clusters (Figure 1): clinical development, work-life integration, health systems literacy, career development, interpersonal and teamwork skills, mentorship, educational skills, research skills, relational competence, leadership, clinical practice, and advocacy skills. Figure 2 demonstrates the GoZone plot, which plots statements based on average feasibility and importance ratings. The three statements with the highest average sum rating of feasibility and importance included: providing culturally competent care (8.56/10), leading a team (8.76/10), and delivering effective feedback (8.82/10).
Conclusions: Through group concept mapping methodology, we developed a framework for pediatric hospital medicine fellow professional development. Limitations of this work include the single-centered nature of our study. Nevertheless, this information can be used to develop a professional development curriculum specific for fellows at our institution. Further, our participants identified professional development topics not currently included in national pediatric hospital medicine fellowship curriculum guidelines. This work may be beneficial for future revisions of these recommendations to better meet the needs that fellows have expressed upon graduation.
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