ACGME in San Diego: Meaning of Medicine in 2020

Leben Tefera, MD

Vascular Medicine Fellow at Massachusetts General Hospital

PGY – 5

03/15/2020

ACGME National Conference 2020 in San Diego

The theme of this year’s 2020 ACGME Conference was “Meaning in Medicine.”The conference was attended by over 4000 physician educators and those that support residencies and fellowships from around the country.

A major theme that was hit throughout the conference was physician wellness and the increasing utilization of social media in medicine. With regards to wellness, several sessions highlighted several factors weighing on physicians and contributing to burnout. A recurring finding was time. Simply put, physicians do not have enough time. Increasingly, physician’s work follows them home, requiring them to finish notes or respond to patient portal messages in the evenings. In doing so, hours have been taken from the physician’s family or personal recovery time. So what can we do about it? Simply put, support. Be it in the form of ancillary staffing or decreased patient burden, additional staffing and work load support have been proven to decrease physician burnout. Additionally, social media has become a means of physicians outreach/communication and more recently, has proven to be a means of collegial support, acting almost as a form of therapy.

#ACGME2020 was an incredible conference. It opened up my eyes to the struggles faced by physicians and health care providers, but more importantly, to the work being done not only by the ACGME to amend these struggles, but by the global medicine community to support one another in a growing age of connectivity.