Perspectives Viewpoints (for Guidelines for Fellowship Letters of Recommendation) Despite its ubiquity, the current letter of recommendation has multiple limitations, including lack of ...standardization. Program director letters should provide an accurate, fair assessment of a fellowship applicant’s capabilities, while also enabling writers to advocate. Standardized letters of recommendation have shown increased reliability as a predictor of future performance, greater inter-rater reliability, and improved task efficiency for writers and readers.
The Alliance for Academic Internal Medicine (AAIM) supports the need for a uniform subspecialty fellowship training and advanced residency training start date. At present, training programs and their ...sponsoring institutions vary widely in the timing of institutional orientation and fellowship/advanced residency training start dates. Some institutions conduct orientation programs before the scheduled completion of the initial training program, which leads to conflicts for the resident between current and future obligations. AAIM believes that requiring residents to report for fellowship before completion of residency training is disruptive to medical education, creates unnecessary stress for the residents, and risks, violating federal labor laws and Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services graduate medical education funding rules. Adoption of Jul 1, 2015 as the earliest start date for all training and orientation activities can be endorsed internally by AAIM institutions and would resolve these conflicts. Here, Barrett et al examine AAIM adoption of a uniform subspecialty fellowship and other advanced training.
The Next Accreditation System (NAS) of the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education (ACGME) began phased implementation in July of 2013. The NAS was developed, in part, to align the ...education of residents and fellows with 21st century medical care. In the report from the Carnegie Foundation regarding the current status of medical education, standardization of progressive learning outcomes was one of the major recommendations cited as necessary to improve medical training. By changing accreditation standards, this alignment is addressed. Here, Collichio et al discuss new evaluation standards for fellows expanding on the original ACGME 6 competencies.
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