Our Philosophy on Educating Fellows

Building a culture of excellence for pain education, clinical care, and research requires the creative efforts of our entire team. We value and trust our fellows to become an integral part of our ongoing efforts to provide to highest quality pain environment to all our stakeholders. We focus on supporting fellows during an intense career development period to provide both the knowledge and modeling of the highest possible professional standards. Adapting to a changing medical climate requires training beyond knowledge acquisition. In order to support fellows through this process, our method involves a stepped transition from passive to active involvement in the quality and safety process. We expect our fellows to transition to practice not only as strong clinicians but also as advocates and resources for quality pain care in whatever practice environment they choose to focus their efforts.

Research

Fellows will have a core faculty advisor to assist with their educational and career agendas. They will be required to develop an academic project with help from their advisor or educational leadership. This can include a quality improvement project, submission of a project or case report to a meeting or journal, research project, educational project or more. Protected time will be included in the fellowship to allow for meeting this requirement. There is departmental funding support to attend a national meeting if your work is accepted to present.

Mentoring / Teaching

Fellows will have the support of pain medicine faculty at all their core locations. When on their multidisciplinary rotations, they will work with a dedicated set of faculty. In their clinical practice, fellows will work in a collaborative effort with faculty, midlevel providers, residents, students, pharmacists, and auxiliary staff in many different environments.

Fellows will select a pain medicine faculty member to serve as their mentor through the academic year. The mentor will serve as a colleagues and resource to assist in clinical development, feedback and career planning.

Practice Management

Fellows have patient and educational requirements through the ACGME. However, these are the minimum standards that do not necessarily provide the range of skills that will be necessary for practice beyond the training environment. We will hope to address these needs with a special practice management project that would be useful for helping them transition into the academic or private practice spheres. We meet these needs with dedicated didactics on billing and documentation. Our discussions of medication management and interventions include recommendations on systems-based approaches to improve throughput and quality at your future clinical practice. Finally, we host a dinner of program alumni in the fall to provide real-world feedback and guidance in career planning and beginning your clinical practice after graduation.