2021 Fall Meeting Summary

It was an honor to host SEA’s 2021 Fall Meeting on Advocacy in Education and Academic Departments. This meeting has taken on several different forms over the past two years and endured the challenges of the pandemic. I hope you all enjoyed and benefited from our excellent speakers and workshop presentation.

Dr. Alan Schwartz opened the meeting with the McLeskey lecture and gave us a broad overview of the Politics of Medical Education. Who are the key players? How are scarce resources managed? What are the political interest of each stake holder? How do we apply this in our everyday interactions within our residency? Dr. Schwartz is an incredibly engaging and innovated educator, and we are grateful to have had him as our keynote speaker.

The McLeskey Lecture was followed by four snap talks that helped us identify the skills required to navigate the complex medical system and to advocate for our trainees. D.J. Himstead is an organizational behaviorist who is an integral member of the University of Illinois Department of Anesthesiology. She outlined steps to “Keep a Pulse on Your Program.” We have all experienced the distance and isolation from each other during the pandemic, and D.J. gave us some tools on how to reconnect as a residency and department.

No residency is immune to the financial stresses of medical education. We had an excellent talk about the role of finances in residency training. Gia MacNicholoff is incredibly well versed in GME financing and reviewed “Caps, Complements, and managing changes in residency numbers.” The snap talk presentations concluded with Dr. Ted Yagamour’s session on how to get our trainees more involved in advocacy and why it is so critical to do so early in their careers.

As our world continues to evolve and our work force’s expectations are redefined, we need to look at how our trainees are viewing their work environment. Dr. Jack Buckley offered an incredibly objective perspective on resident unions. He took us through his experiences with unionization of residents at UCLA and how to continually train residents who are part of resident unions.

We enjoyed five exciting workshops that allowed us to practice many of the skills we learned over the day. Workshops included the following topics: “Negotiating for success,” “Feedback Sandwich critique,” “Creating a professional development curriculum,” “Advocating for diversity in the recruitment process,” and “Residents struggling with exams.”

We sincerely hope you enjoyed and benefited from the program we developed for the SEA 2021 Fall Meeting.

Dr. Rena Beckerly, Dr. Heather Nixon, and Dr. Jackie Galvan

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