This is one in a series of project profiles of the ACGME’s Back to Bedside initiative, which empowers residents and fellows to develop innovations that foster meaning and joy in work and engage their patients on a deeper level.

At the 2021 ACGME Annual Educational Conference, Athena Gonzalez and her team presented their poster, Strategies for Optimizing Fit Testing for Residents and the Evolving Role of the Program Coordinator, about their work in response to the COVID-19 pandemic to ensure residents were wearing properly sized and fitted masks and respirators, even as supplies changed.

Bree Bower and her team in the anesthesiology and pain medicine department at Nationwide Children’s Hospital in Columbus, Ohio studied the affects of COVID-19 on fellow recruitment and presented that work at the 2021 ACGME Annual Educational Conference in the Poster Hall.

2021 Debra L. Dooley GME Program Coordinator Excellence Awardee Dawn Fountain works in the general surgery residency program at the University of Kansas School of Medicine in Wichita.

2021 GME Debra L. Dooley GME Program Coordinator Excellence Awardee Debra (Debbie) Kay Stevens is the program administrator for internal medicine at the Brody School of Medicine at East Carolina University.

2021 Parker J. Palmer Courage to Teach Awardee Ann Schwartz, MD is the director of residency education in psychiatry at Emory University School of Medicine.

2021 GME Institutional Coordinator Excellence Awardee Lowell Virginia (Jennie) Craft, MPPM, C-TAGME is the director, GME Office at the University of Alabama Hospital – Birmingham.

2021 Parker J. Palmer Courage to Teach Awardee Wilma F. Bergfeld, is the director of the dermatopathology fellowship, a senior dermatologist, and emeritus director, dermatopathology in the departments of dermatology and pathology at the Cleveland Clinic.

2021 David C. Leach Awardee Thomas R. Greenwood, DO is the project lead for the family medicine department at Central Washington Family Medicine.

Outstanding medical skills are not the same as leadership skills, and many newly appointed chief residents find a gap between their education and training and their new leadership role. To bridge that gap, the ACGME offers the Leadership Skills Training Program for chief residents.