Newsroom and Blog Updates on Pursuing Excellence

Dr. Ashraf Mohamed El Ghul, is the designated institutional official (DIO) and Internal Medicine Residency Program Director at Mafraq Hospital in Abu Dhabi in the United Arab Emirates (UAE). His institution’s and program’s experience with ACGME International brought him to the 2019 ACGME Annual Educational Conference and we asked him to share his experience.

Debra L. Dooley came to the ACGME 22 years ago, initially in an administrative role with the Review Committee for Internal Medicine. She retires today, after 10.5 years as the Director of Educational Activities, where she leads the team responsible for producing the ACGME’s educational programming, and most notably the Annual Educational Conference. We spent some time with her before she left, discussing her career, her mentors, her legacy, and the renaming of the Debra L. Dooley Program Coordinator Excellence Award.

Jamie Arsenyevictz, MPH, led a team at Geisinger Health System to develop a GME analysis tool, leading to the development of shared language and knowledge surrounding GME finance and value between the GME Office and Geisinger leadership.

Lauren Wojnarowski, MA is the ACGME's Associate Director, Educational Projects, working in the Education Department's Educational Activities team. She is one of the planners of the Annual Educational Conference, and her team's role is to handle collection of educational content and logistics (besides AV) to produce the conference each year. We asked her to share some more about her role and what the conference experience is like for her behind the scenes.

Health provider shortage areas, comprised of urban and rural regions with high populations of people struggling with multi-morbidity and poverty, often have a challenge with physician recruitment. Dr. Meaghan Ruddy, vice president for Academic Affairs and director of Medical Education for The Wright Center for GME in Scranton, Pennsylvania, describes how a teaching health center family medicine program operationalized as a graduate medical education safety-net consortium.

In 2016, a Castlight Health report named Wilmington, North Carolina, the city with the highest abuse opioid abuse rate in the US. In response, Joseph Pino, MD, MHA, and members of the community sought to safely reduce the number of opioids prescribed, increase adherence to best practices in opioid prescribing, and reduce emergency department visits due to opioid overdose. His poster, presented at the 2019 ACGME Annual Educational Conference, reports the outcome of these multiple initiatives.

Dr. Carol A. Bernstein is the 2019 winner of the John C. Gienapp Award and the first ever women to be honored with the award--on International Woman's Day to boot! Dr. Bernstein is Professor of Psychiatry and Neurology at New York University. She has spent her entire career engaged in the education and mentorship of the next generation of physicians in addition to maintaining a clinical practice in general psychiatry at the New York University School of Medicine.

Join the fun in this year’s #ACGME2019 Exhibit Hall with our Discover the Doc daily scavenger hunt. Follow the clues to find the fictional doctor Funko Pop! dolls hidden among the booths daily! To kick things off, two dolls will be hidden for discovery at this evening’s Welcoming/Poster Reception and Exhibitor Kick-Off. Here are your clues!