CHICAGO, July 19, 2004 – The Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education’s Board of Directors addressed duty hours, program requirement revisions, combined programs and other issues at a busy summer meeting, held June 27-29 in Rosemont, Ill.
The ACGME Board rejected a proposal submitted by some of the surgical residency review committees to allow surgical chief residents (residents in their final year of training in a program leading to initial board certification) to be permitted to be on duty up to 88 hours per week, averaged over four weeks. The ACGME’s duty hour standards limit weekly duty hours for residents to a maximum of 80 hours a week, averaged over four weeks. The Board determined that programs that want chief residents to be on duty an extra eight hours a week for educational purposes already have a mechanism to do so. Under the standards, programs on a case-by-case basis can petition their residency review committee, if permitted by the residency review committee for that specialty, for up to a 10% increase in maximum weekly duty hours for residents.
The Board also approved a plan for the RRCs to review combined programs and designate the training in them as accredited. The ACGME will first review the training in combined medicine-pediatrics programs, the most common combined program, sometime after January 2005. It will then use that process as a model for designating the training in other combined programs as accredited.
The Board approved revisions to program requirements for neurology, emergency medicine, vascular and interventional radiology and nuclear radiology. It also approved the program requirements for the new subspecialty of sleep medicine.
The Board also approved the creation of a new award, the “Courage to Lead” award, which will be given each year to an outstanding designated institutional official. The award will be presented in February in conjunction with the Parker J. Palmer “Courage to Teach” awards, which honor outstanding program directors.
The ACGME’s fall Board meeting will be held Sept. 27-28 in Rosemont, Ill.
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The ACGME is a private, non-profit council that accredits 7,800 residency programs
in 27 specialties affecting 100,000 residents. Its mission is to improve the quality
of health care in the United States by ensuring and improving the quality of graduate
medical education for physicians in training.
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