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- CAP Leaders Emphasize Critical Graduate Workforce Training in New Article
Pathology leaders published a paper on the importance of pathology workforce training in Academic Pathology on April 7. The paper titled, “Evidence-Based Alignment of Pathology Residency With Practice II: Findings and Implications,” written by Stephen Black-Schaffer, MD, FCAP; Stanley J. Robboy, MD, FACP; David J. Gross, PhD; James Crawford, MD, PhD, FCAP; Melissa Austin, MD, FCAP; Donald S. Karcher, MD, FCAP; Rebecca Johnson, MD, FCAP; Suzanne Powell, MD, FCAP; Joseph Sanfrancesco, MD, FCAP; and Michael Cohen, MD, FCAP, outlined survey data research from new-in-practice pathologists and of new pathologists, assessing how pathology graduate medical education prepares its pathologists for the practice of laboratory medicine.
The quantitative analysis presented in the paper suggests the current three-or-four year “one size fits all” pathology residency curriculum, plus one or two one-year fellowships, does not optimally address the breadth and variety of actual practice. The authors analyzed four years of new-in-practice pathologists' surveys on how the extent of their training in a broad range of practice areas compared with the importance of these areas in actual practice. These surveys consistently showed areas important in practice in which new practitioners report they would have benefited from more training, as well as areas in which their training had been more than what was useful to them in practice.
These issues point to a need to reconsider the emphasis of training in pathology graduate medical education and the relative roles of residency and fellowship training. Academic Pathology is an open access journal sponsored by the Association of Pathology Chairs, established to give voice to the innovations in leadership and management of academic departments of pathology.