A Military Transitional Year Professionalism Curriculum

Abstract

Transitional year residencies must provide a general enough clinical experience to prepare residents for a wide variety of specialty training programs. In the military, they must also provide an experience intense enough to give a background for independent practice as a general medical officer. The end result should be a clinician professionally mature enough to take on the roles of a specialty trainee, clinic supervisor, and/or command advisor.In our training program, it was made clear in 2008 during the annual internal review that faculty had serious concerns about resident performance regarding professionalism. These concerns were partially based on recent events resulting in dismissal of 1 resident from the program for repeated lapses in professionalism and program-level remediation for several others. Several faculty members called for a transitional year program professionalism curriculum.Although professionalism curricula have been developed and published for many other specialties, such as pediatrics, surgery, anesthesiology, and internal medicine, 1-6 published guidelines on professionalism training for transitional year residencies is lacking. The program sought to create a novel approach to professionalism training based on how it obtained feedback on resident performance in this core competency. Methods Settings and ParticipantsTripler Army Medical Center has a small military transitional year residency program with 10 to 14 residents per year and 14 designated core clinical faculty. Approximately one-half of the residents select the program after failing to match in their specialty of choice. These residents will either match for an alternate program in their intern year or become general medical officers at the completion of their transitional year residency. The remaining residents are preselected for residencies in ophthalmology, radiology, dermatology, or anesthesiology.