What Do Stakeholders Want From Resident Conference Programming?

The Annual Educational Conference (AEC) is the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education's (ACGME's) largest learning and networking event targeted toward the graduate medical education (GME) community. In recent years, the ACGME's Council of Review Committee Residents (CRCR)—a council composed of resident and fellow representatives from all accredited specialties—contributed conference presentations and attended the meeting. Consistently, CRCR members described the personal value they found in attending sessions, networking, and the overall experience. Many members expressed an interest in recruiting other trainees interested in future roles in GME to similarly attend.During the 2019 AEC, there was substantial growth in resident and fellow attendance due to the Back to Bedside initiative—a competitive funding opportunity that encourages residents and fellows to foster meaning in their work by creating and leading innovative projects. In 2021, the Back to Bedside Work and Advisory Group (WAG) hosted a resident- and fellow-focused, interactive, virtual pre-conference session designed to provide skills for becoming institutional change agents.Based on interest from trainees in conference programming relevant to their career stage, the CRCR set out to collaborate with the Back to Bedside WAG on designing programming specific to residents and fellows. Recognizing that numerous barriers exist to trainee attendance at the AEC—such as securing non-clinical time and financial constraints associated with registration and travel—the CRCR and WAG designed an interactive breakout session for the ACGME Education Committee to assess what would compel GME leadership to make the AEC a priority for trainees to attend. A parallel breakout session was conducted with the CRCR to assess the resident/fellow perspective.The WAG met with the ACGME Education Subcommittee and the CRCR virtually in September 2021. To optimize member input, we minimized didactic time and used breakout rooms with interactive worksheets created on Google Documents to collect ideas in real time from participants.During both the ACGME Education Subcommittee and CRCR meetings, attendees were separated into breakout groups. Groups were then tasked with answering the following prompt: “Imagine you are a designated institutional official (DIO): Sending a resident to the ACGME Annual Educational Conference would cost approximately $1,500 including registration fees, lodging, travel, and food. What would compel you, as leaders (DIOs), to pay for residents to attend the conference? What experiences, knowledge, or skills should be offered to residents to make this conference a priority?” Each breakout group had a designated scribe who took notes during the discussions, and these notes were analyzed for similar themes and ideas.Four breakout groups consisting of ACGME Education Committee members, each led by a member of the Back to Bedside WAG, discussed a number of important considerations in compelling DIOs to support residents to attend the conference (Table 1). In discussing what specific skills and experiences should be offered to residents at the conference, the Education Committee groups' thoughts focused on 4 main themes (Table 2).The 3 breakout groups had various discussions surrounding the topics related to AEC participation and engagement. Groups were composed of current residents, fellows, and junior faculty from multiple specialties. Discussions on the provided prompts varied within each group, which are highlighted in tables 3 and 4.First, in response to “What would compel you, as leaders (DIOs), to pay for residents to attend the conference?” 5 key ideas emerged as popular themes within the discussion (Table 3).CRCR meeting participants continued their discussion with identifying specific examples, as they discussed the prompt “What experiences, knowledge, or skills should be offered to residents to make this conference a priority?” Six main themes were identified on retrospective analysis of the groups' notes (Table 4).The above trends emerged without prompting from current and recent residents on the CRCR. Many of the participants have witnessed various conferences during undergraduate medical education and GME. Their experiences have helped to provide the above themes, which were vital in the preparation for the AEC pre-conference.As the role of GME leaders continues to evolve, and as potential opportunities for an individual to engage in academic leadership changes, formal and information educational and scholarly leadership opportunities become a key component of GME leadership workforce development.1-3Further, we agree with the emerging truism that resident empowerment is a current powerful opportunity for GME excellence and innovation.4 The results in this exercise support these concepts and provide pragmatic operationalization of how these concepts might be employed to enhance the trainee experience in a well-established GME conference.Across the groups, the themes were similar and could be organized at 3 levels of benefit: the benefit to the resident attendee, the benefit to the larger institution that supported the attendee, and the benefit to the larger community of academic clinician leaders and the evolution of the roles required by the GME community.Recognizing that the time commitment implied in conference attendance requires a specific immediate value to the attendee, participants highlighted the importance of providing professional growth through presenting scholarly work, networking opportunities to facilitate navigating a career in academic and GME leadership roles, and broad-ranging educational sessions. This included opportunities for specific skills training in items that allow them to take advantage of these networking opportunities or grow professionally and personally in academic leadership positions.As institutions and departments will need to support the time and cost of resident attendance, the value to the institution must be considered. Many participants highlighted that any skills or educational sessions should include some experiential component to allow residents to bring practical skills back to their institutions for wider benefit. This was particularly relevant for topics that have broad application and are not typically taught in a residency curriculum or are emerging with new information or best practices. Again, skills that allow this type of informational and educational promotion were also highlighted by the groups as valuable to the institution. An illustration of this would be a session on peer coaching or change management with the expectation that the attendee returns to set up a peer coaching program at their home institution or give a local grand rounds on change management concepts.Finally, both groups highlighted the opportunity to provide a tertiary level of value to the current and future GME community. This recognizes the role of GME educators as workforce development leaders.5 The recruitment and development of future GME leaders from a diverse pool of resident leaders who will become the “inspirational faculty role models overseeing supervised, humanistic, clinical educational experiences”6 of tomorrow fulfills both the mission and the vision of the ACGME.Residents who are empowered to begin making impactful change early in their careers often grow to be GME leaders. This article describes specific themes that residents and GME leaders believe can support such empowerment. Future opportunities for developing the next generation of GME leaders will be supported by longitudinal experiences for larger groups of residents. With targeted programming, the AEC may be an opportunity to provide this experience to a larger resident audience.