Over the last year the GME Office has made a concerted effort to improve resources for our residents and fellows, in particular call rooms and parenting support. We know that the intersection between parenthood and training can be a pinch point for many of our residents and fellows and will continue our improvements around this and other issues.
Recent improvements have included:
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Lactation room at UWMC – Montlake
General Parenting Resources
- New Growing Your Family webpage intended to centralize information for residents and fellows regarding parenting, parental leave and crowd-sourced tips.
- Creation of the Parenthood Peer Mentorship Program (PPMP) to match parent trainees with experienced parent physicians.
- On October 7th we held the Family Planning & Fertility and Navigating Parental Leave for Resident Physicians event (view recording). Over 40 residents, fellows and their guests attended this event and heard from subject matter experts on fertility and parental leave, and heard from a panel of their peers.
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New refrigerator installed by GME at the VA Puget Sound lactation room
Lactation Rooms
- Survey of system-wide lactation rooms and addition of this information to the GME website.
- Creation of an additional lactation room in the UWMC-Montlake Crow’s Nest (Housestaff Lounge).
- Installation of a refrigerator in the VA Puget Sound lactation room.
- Imminent installation of refrigerators in 6 Seattle Children’s lactation rooms (pending inspection by Facilities).
- Hospital-led addition of lactation refrigerators at the Harborview Medical Center lactation rooms.
- Purchase of lactation coolers available for long-term loaning to support residents and fellows rotating in hospitals without convenient refrigerator access or who prefer a cooler rather than a shared fridge.
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Workstation in a VA Puget Sound Call Room
Call Rooms
- Inventory and assessment of system-wide call rooms.
- Transition to single-occupancy call rooms to improve safety for residents and fellows during COVID-19.
- Hospital-led creation of two brand new call rooms at UWMC-Northwest, with three additional rooms in progress.
We want to thank all of our GME staff who have worked on these initiatives especially Natalie Brady, Hadar Duman, Cindy Hamra, Dr. Jennifer Best and Hayley Fisher. Additionally we sincerely appreciate the hard work of our hospital partners including Dr. Tom Staiger (UWMC-Montlake), Dr. Vivek Jain (VAPS), Seth Hennessey (UWMC-Northwest), Kari Dietrich (SCH), Holly Smith (VAPS), Debbie Colpitts (VAPS), Evelyn Sinsel (HMC), Pam Renna (UWMC-Northwest), Amy Akers (UWMC-Northwest) and Chris Pendergrass (SCH).
The GME Office continues to work on improving support and resources available for all of our residents and fellows. We look forward to continuing to share our work with the community.