Pediatric Critical Care Medicine Fellowship

Conferences

In addition to bedside teaching and daily case-based discussions on work rounds, the fellows attend weekly didactic teaching conferences (2 hour-long sessions per week) covering a wide array of topics, including basic pathophysiology and management of critical care illness and disease, biostatistics, innovative therapies and more.

Fellows participate in a Leadership Curriculum designed to teach leadership and crisis resource management skills.  This curriculum includes a combination of simulated sessions at the Center for Medical Simulation and didactic sessions at MGH.  The emphasis of the curriculum is to improve communication and leadership skills during a crisis, with topics including:

• Role clarification during a clinical crisis
• Communication between medical team members during a crisis
• Communication styles that facilitate co-operation
• Closed loop communication when assigning or accepting tasks
• Speaking up against authority during a crisis

Fellows also participate in an Ethics Curriculum that includes rotating didactic lectures as well as group sessions with families who volunteer to come share their memories of past PICU hospitalizations with the group.  The family symposium includes a Mother Grief Group, where families of children who have died in the PICU reflect with staff over the effective and ineffective communication styles they experienced during their ICU stay and the lasting impact these interactions had on them.  The Ethics curriculum also includes a Religious, Spiritual and Cultural Forum, where representatives from 6 religious faiths and cultures discuss recent cases and allow the fellow to gain a better perspective of what critical illness and death mean to each one.  It also teaches how to discuss particular concepts, such as brain death, in a culturally sensitive manner.

Fellows are expected to prepare for and participate in monthly morbidity and mortality conferences and journal clubs.

Fellows also participate in a monthly Collaborative Practice Meeting, a multi-disciplinary conference focused on quality improvement efforts in the PICU.

Beyond these division-specific conferences, fellows are encouraged to take advantage of the many other didactic conferences offered by MassGeneral, including but not limited to Pediatric Grand Rounds, Trauma Conference, Pediatric ECMO conference, Pediatric Transport Conference, Pediatric Ethics Committee Meetings and lecture series, and Adult Critical Care/Anesthesia/Pulmonary Conference.

Sample Conference Schedules