Abstract
Background
There has been a declining national trend in recent years of resident applications to Infectious Disease (ID) fellowship programs. This dearth of interested and available applicants has resulted in many programs failing to fill some or all of their fellowship slots. Our ID fellowship program, founded in 2013 at Allegheny General Hospital, had met with similar difficulty.
Methods
To increase the recruitment pool of candidates and combat the challenge to fill our positions, we incorporated a combined 3 year ID-Critical Care Medicine (CCM) track in 2016, initially with one of our two annual fellowship slots allotted to this track. This entailed a collaborative effort between the ID and CCM divisions, an internal application completion outlining the need and rationale for this combined program, and finally, approval from the institutional as well as the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education (ACGME).
Results
The number of applicants interviewed from 2013 to 2016 for ID (pre-inception of the ID-CCM track), as well as those for ID, ID-CCM, or those interviewing for both tracks following 2016, were counted. We noted a consistent increasing trend in the numbers interviewed for both the ID (4, 8, and 12 total applicants) and ID-CCM (4, 10, and 12 total applicants) tracks over the three since the inception of our combined fellowship program; 3 additional applicants in years 2017 and 2018, and 5 in 2019, expressed interest in either ID or ID-CCM (Graph 1). This favorably amounted to filling our training positions.
Conclusion
Implementation of a combined ID-CCM fellowship program proved to be a viable strategy to increase the number of applicants at our institution. Given the success of having one dually-accredited slot, we have expanded the combined-track to both positions. As the first fully-integrated ID-CCM fellowship program in the country, we may be pioneering this novel training pathway for future physicians.
Disclosures
All authors: No reported disclosures.
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