Presented at the 2012 AAPM Annual Meeting « Back

Simulation-Based Curriculum for Chronic Pain Medicine Fellowships: A Technical Report

Ravish Kapoor, MD, rkapoor@hmc.psu.edu¹, Jill M. Eckert, DO¹, (1) Penn State Milton S. Hershey Medical Center, Hershey, Pennsylvania

Introduction: Pain medicine fellowships comprise of trainees from various subspecialties. Recently, the requirements for these training programs have undergone changes in an effort to produce better pain medicine physicians. Since residency training now varies with regards to core disciplines, individuals bring to their fellowship their own areas of expertise. This inevitably allows gaps to exist in the training of fellows as clinicians in the domain of pain medicine. In addition to minimal requirements, various procedural skills and crisis based proficiencies in their day-to-day practice is needed. We describe a simulation based curriculum for pain medicine fellowship training used at our institution that serves to help meet these goals. Methods: We have established a simulation based curriculum that is broken into three groups: Objective Structured Clinical Examination (OSCE), fluoroscopy guided procedural skills, and crisis based management. Results: Our fellows have found these activities to be beneficial in terms of providing them with the practice and feedback needed to enhance their confidence in performing procedures, as well as handling challenging situations that could potentially be encountered in their day-to-day practice. Discussion: Taking into account the recent modifications to the pain fellowship program requirements set forth by the ACGME, the described curriculum has been implemented to exemplify and transcend the stated criteria for accreditation. We conclude that the described curriculum has a significant positive impact on the quality of teaching, level of confidence, and practice competency achieved by those who train in our pain medicine fellowship program.

Funding: None