Annual EMSC Grantee Meeting

Ambulatory Pediatric Association Update

June 20 – 22, 2006

DAVID JAFFE, MD: Good morning. I was asked to speak briefly about the Ambulatory Pediatric Association and I will repeat the disclaimer that it’s been a year since I’ve been on the board of the APA. So, if there’s anybody in the audience who has updated information that I haven’t been able to take from the website and my talking, please feel free to help me out.

The mission of the APA is to foster the health of children, adolescents, and families by promoting generalism in Academic Pediatrics and academics in General Pediatrics, and there’s a part after that that defines emergency medicine as one of the generalist sub-specialties. And so, they have always been, I think, an important home for the academic wing of pediatric emergency medicine and particularly for a place to present our research. There were three sessions at the annual meeting devoted to emergency medicine and a very robust section of papers. There are also other topic sessions devoted to emergency medicine at the annual meeting, and I believe Sue (inaudible) are program committee members who would be glad to have your suggestions on topics for the future Pediatric Academic Society’s meeting.

Just a few programs worth mentioning that are important to the APA. The APA has funded a New Century Scholars Program, which is a program designed to identify, under represented minority, pediatric residents who have potential to be academic leaders and provide them with specific mentors, both junior and senior mentors, and to bring them to the annual meetings in order to foster their development in academics. This is a relatively new program and I think the first group came last year. There were about 20 such scholars who were identified. There is a fellowship in public policy. This is sponsored by HERSA as well and it’s directed at physicians with interest in advancing child health through the promotion of effective public policies. And the APA selected Chris Lundvragan who is also a leader in the hospitalist movement to participate in this program most recently.

There’s a very important document, the Educational Guidelines for Residency Training, that’s available on the website. And this is an amazing document, which has more than 340 goals of training are written, and all of them are categorized by the competency domains. And so, for anybody who’s involved in educational programming and trying to meet all of the new requirements that we all have to meet, this is really a quite useful document.

There is a faculty development program that sponsors faculty development workshops at the PAS meeting. And there’s also a networking resource that allows faculty to seek specific expertise in faculty development. And there’s a new educational scholars program, which is a product of planning that’s going to be launched in 2006. The APA is actually going to take on the role of accrediting general pediatrics fellowships and in preparation, transition perhaps, to having that become a Board of Pediatrics activity. And Steve Ludwig has been heading that project.

And then finally, the APA sponsors the Journal of Ambulatory Pediatrics, which is having sort of meteoric rise in the impact factor and has been doing really quite well. And I think it’s only six or seven years in publication and it’s another source of potential publication for some of our papers, particularly as they relate to education, health care policy, health care economics. They publish things along those lines and I think it would be worth keeping that in mind.

The APA is actually involved in sponsoring or co-sponsoring two research networks that are just worth bringing to your attention. One is called CoreNet, which is a research network of continuity clinics and it is a national practice based research network and has been quite successful. Jan (inaudible) has been leading this activity and they’ve had eight recent publications and abstracts in their relatively short time of existence. And then there’s a new network called PRISE, the Pediatric Research and In-patient Settings, which is really designed to be a network for hospitalists. And this is a fairly fledging network but it is an APA activity and I think an important one for us to keep our eyes on as the whole hospitalist movement develops.

The APA is involved in research, and I just thought I would bring to your attention, that they do provide young investigator awards. The awards can range up to about $10,000 and since 2002, the APA has awarded 35 of these and an excess of $350,000 to these investigators. So, for fellows, this is a source of both pride, recognition, and a small source of support for some of the work that our young investigators are doing.

And then the final thing I’ll mention is that the APA is nothing if it is not made up of lots of interest groups. One of the prominent members once said that the goal is to have an interest group for every member and a member for every interest group. But I thought I would select just a few to mention. I won’t talk about what each is doing but just that there are groups in Emergency Medicine, Emergency Medicine Program Directors, Advocacy Training, Environmental Health, Hospital Medicine, Injury Control, Pain, and Serving the Underserved. So, you can see, some of the groups that I thought would be of interest to this group. I think that’s all I have. Thanks very much.