Dear GME Community,
Cindy Hamra Associate Dean, GME
December News & Notes has several useful reminders including information about accessing UW Medicine Care for Employees, accepting gifts from patients, and several great events in the new year.
From the GME Office, we’re excited to celebrate Dr. Itay Bentov, Associate Professor, Anesthesiology and Pain Medicine, as winner of the 2023 Bruce C. Gilliland Award. We also congratulate Dr. Tim Dellit on his appointment as CEO of UW Medicine and Dean of the School of Medicine. Dr. Dellit did his fellowship here at UWSOM in infectious diseases!
Dr. Joyner’s December blog shares our reflections on 2023. Happy holidays to those in our community who celebrate and wishing all a happy and healthy 2024!
Thank you,
Cindy
Policies and Processes
- The holiday season is often a time of giving by grateful patients, vendors, and other outside organizations. State employees within UW Medicine are governed by the Washington State Ethics in Public Service Act with regard to the gifts they may accept and how they may redirect gifts they cannot accept. Common questions about gifts from patients and other external sources (including food and beverages) and other related topics are answered in the Gifts from External Sources FAQs on the UW Medicine Compliance website. Additional information is available on the Internal Audit website.
- A reminder that residents and fellows are considered essential personnel who are expected to report for duty; please see guidance from Residency and Fellowship Position Appointment (RFPA) Agreement 2023-2024 and Executive Order 27: Suspended Operations Policy.
- Remember that trainees who are members of the RFPU-NW are entitled to one (1) paid personal holiday per calendar year. If unused in the calendar year, the personal holiday is forfeit, and it is not paid at separation. It is the employee’s responsibility to schedule the personal holiday before December 31st. If before the end of the calendar year the employee requests the use of their personal holiday in accordance with the employer’s time off or leave procedures and the employer denies the request, the employee is entitled to carry over the personal holiday to the next calendar year. Please see complete information in Article 12 of the RFPU-NW Contract.
Program Information
- Welcome New Program Administrators:
- Sydney Anderson, Child Abuse Pediatrics
- The GME Appointment Manager position is now live, and we are accepting applications! You can find the position posted here. Hayley Fisher is happy to answer questions about the position.
- The ACGME has a weekly e-Communication. If you wish to receive it, email ACGMECommunications@acgme.org.
Events of Interest
- GME Lunch & Learns
- December 21: Canceled
- January 18: ACGME Surveys
- February 15: Washington Physicians Health Program (WPHP)
- Presentations from the November and December Program Administrator meetings are available on the Program Administrator Meetings page.
- We invite you to two evenings of writing and storytelling supported by the UW Medicine Well-Being Grant. Professor Susan Meyer at Seattle University will guide us to reflect on our personal and professional experiences from the pandemic into the present. You are welcome to join one or both of these free sessions (January 16th and February 6th).
- Navigating Parental Leave for Resident & Fellow Physicians will be Tuesday, February 6th from 6:30-7:30pm via Zoom. Please see the agenda. Register today. Registration closes February 2. If you can’t make it, a recording will be posted to the Housestaff Events webpage.
- Please join us on Tuesday, February 6, 2024, from 8:30am-12pm for the AY25 Onboarding Kickoff Meeting. This virtual event will provide an overview of the onboarding and reappointment processes for the upcoming academic year. Attendance at this meeting is highly encouraged for all program administrators and any department staff involved in the appointment and onboarding process of new residents and fellows, including those of you who are not program administrators but have roles in Workday. Please see the Save the Date email sent on December 21st for more information.
- Registration for the ACGME Meaning in Medicine 2024 Annual Education Conference is open! The conference is scheduled to take place in Orlando, Florida at the Rosen Shingle Creek Resort March 7-9, 2024. More information can be found on the conference website. Support for meeting attendance is ensured by the clinical chair in every new Program Director Appointment Letter.
- The University of Washington School of Medicine is sponsoring the 2024 Graduate Medical Education (GME) Summit. The focus will be collaborating to address workforce needs within the WWAMI region and beyond. Early bird registration for the GME Summit 2024 is now open! Join us on April 25-26, 2024, in Anchorage, Alaska at the BP Energy Center. Stay tuned in the coming months as we announce speakers.
- Please save the date(s)! The GME Office is pleased to invite program leadership (PDs, APDs, PAs) to participate in an educational series that we will be offering throughout 2024. We have designed this series in response to cross-program challenges as observed in our ACGME surveys and in our work supporting programs and trainees. See 11/9 email from Cindy Hamra for more information.
- Other GME Events can be found on our calendar.
Projects and Resources
Please review the GME Annual Program Timeline for important dates for the months of December and January including: Milestones mid-year reporting, semi-annual Procedures Certification entry in MedHub, ACGME Annual Survey preparation, and SF Match registration (for applicable programs).- Our PLAs team is hoping to make strides in communication and improving the process for our community in several ways:
- We created a new, simplified introduction video for the PLA process as a whole here.
- We want to make sure the barriers to completing a rotation request or PLA are as low as possible. If you could please fill out the linked survey and provide feedback it would be helpful and allow us to improve the process.
- Please review the email from Chris Gibson sent on 12/19 for data on expiring PLAs.
- Please review “Access to UW Medicine Care for Employees” from The Huddle for information about help for UW Medicine employees and their families to gain better access to UW Medicine facilities and providers.
- The WWAMI Institute for Simulation in Healthcare (WISH) is the simulation-based education program serving all of UW Medicine, since 2005. WISH is undergoing some exciting developments and is seeking input from all users (as well as would-be future users) to help inform strategic plans for the next 5 years. By the end of this year, please take a few moments to provide your responses around both current and anticipated future simulation-based utilization, and services that would benefit your training programs in the coming years. For additional comments or questions, please reach out to WISH Associate Director, Megan Sherman or Chief of the Division for Healthcare Simulation Science, Dr. Rob Sweet.
- Every year, the UW School of Medicine Alumni Association recognizes exceptional alumni with a series of awards. We encourage UW School of Medicine alumni, faculty, staff and other professional colleagues to nominate alumni for one or more of our awards. All alumni who received a degree from, or completed residency or fellowship training in, a program administered by the UW School of Medicine or one of our academic departments are eligible. Visit the website for full descriptions of the Distinguished Alumni Award, the Alumni Humanitarian Award, the Alumni Service Award and the Alumni Early Achievement Award. Nominations for the 2024 awards are open; you may submit nominations until December 31, 2023 here.
- The UW Office of Global Affairs is excited to announce that effective January 1, 2024, all UW faculty, staff and other academic personnel who are traveling overseas on official UW business will now be covered by an international emergency medical and security insurance policy. This coverage is provided at no cost to the traveler and differs from the current coverage in that it includes emergency medical benefits.
- The GME Office is supporting a new project called the Names & Pronunciations Initiative, which aims to not only highlight the importance of name pronunciations, but also improve communication by providing physical badges (for those who want one) which include users’ written phonetic name pronunciation. Anyone interested in learning more about the project or who wants to order a pronunciation badge can do so at: https://www.names-pronunciations-initiative.com/. If you receive a badge for someone not in your program or if you have any questions, please email the project lead, Sudiptho (UW MS4).
- The GME Office has posted an updated letter from Dr. Joyner for prospective residents and fellows to our GME Prospective Residents & Fellows page.
People
- Justin Bullock, fellow, Nephrology, is co-author of “Stereotype Threat and Gender Bias in Internal Medicine Residency: It is Still Hard to be in Charge” in the Journal of General Internal Medicine.
- Anne Browning, UW Assistant Dean of Well-Being, shares some lessons from rowing on how to cultivate resilience in your own life in “What the 1936 UW Rowing Team Teaches Us About Resilience” from The Huddle.
- In the latest resident scholarship spotlight, “Medical Mistrust Among Black Patients with Serious Illness,” Kristine Cueva designed and led a mixed methods study to better understand patient perspectives. View spotlight.
- In recognition of their substantial contributions to local healthcare quality and safety, Gwen Bernacki, clinical assistant professor (Cardiology), Medhavi Bole, clinical assistant professor (Allergy and Infectious Diseases), Jurjen de Jong, Internal Medicine chief resident, Soloman Graf, associate professor (Hematology and Oncology), and Sarah Sanghavi, clinical associate professor (Nephrology) have been awarded the title of Practitioner Lead in Quality & Safety (PLQS) within the Hospital & Specialty Medicine service line at the VA Puget Sound Health Care System.
- Congratulations to Ksenia Ershova, resident, Anesthesiology & Pain Medicine, and Bonica Scholar, for winning the 2023 FAER Resident Scholar Abstract Award at the 2023 ASA meeting.
- The Society of General Internal Medicine is honoring members at the front lines of Social Justice with their member highlight series, “Frontliners: Social Justice.” Rebecca Gold, resident, Internal Medicine, is highlighted this month. She recently presented a poster in collaboration with UW’s Breast Health Equity group on the inequities of breast cancer care along racial lines, particularly for Somali and Ethiopian immigrants living in Seattle. Read the challenges in conducting her research and how she hopes this research will help address inequities in breast cancer care in the future.
- Mark Harrast, Sports Medicine PM&R Program Director, is featured in “Ways to stop muscle cramps from interrupting your run, by Dr. Mark Harrast, medical director of the UW Medicine Seattle Marathon,” “ Mark Harrast demystifies the pre-race meal,” and “Dr. Mark Harrast shares advice about how to manage a pesky hamstring injury” from Right as Rain.
- Nicholas Johnson, Critical Care Medicine Associate Program Director, is co-author of “Vaccine Effectiveness Against Influenza A-Associated Hospitalization, Organ Failure, and Death: United States, 2022-2023” in Clinical Infectious Diseases.
- Department of Medicine Chair Barbara Jung is PI on a new grant from the Department of Defense for her project “Mechanisms of Activin Signaling in Acute Pancreatitis” to test the hypothesis that activin A signaling is an early and targetable component of morbidity/mortality-inducing inflammatory response in severe acute pancreatitis (AP).
- Vishesh Kapur, Sleep Medicine Program Director, is quoted in “UW sleep expert among those pushing federal leaders for permanent standard time” from KIRO News.
- Several Department of Medicine researchers have received additional funding from the Breast Cancer Research Foundation (BCRF) to continue ongoing studies. Among them is who will continue to investigate whether a progesterone tracer known as FFNP-PET can be used as a better predictive marker of endocrine therapy’s efficacy. Read the full story from Hutch News.
- Pediatric Allergy & Immunology fellow Gabriel Mendoza has been appointed to the ACGME Review Committee for Allergy and Immunology.
- Neha Deshpande, Lisa Chew, Jill Watanabe and Somnath Mookherjee (Academic Hospitalist Fellowship Program Director) wrote “A letter to today’s academic generalist mentor” and Jennifer Wright, Helen Starks, Lauren Beste, Jared Klein (Addiction Medicine Associate Program Director) and Somnath Mookherjee wrote “Lessons from a project-based mentorship initiative” in SGIM Forum.
- Leo Morales, Assistant Dean for Healthcare Equity and Quality, is featured in “Washington lacks Spanish-speaking nurses — for an Everett student, it’s personal” from Herald Net. He is also co-author of “Critical Reflections on This Historical Moment for Community-engaged and Participatory Research” in Progress in Community Health Partnerships: Research, Education, and Action.
- Sarah Prager, Complex Family Planning Program Director, is featured in “How the overturn of ‘Roe’ still impacts Washington abortion care” from Crosscut.
- Russ Van Gelder, chair of Department of Ophthalmology, is featured in “Sleep experts, physicians address effects of increased travel on student-athletes, offer recommendations” from UW News.