PCN President's Message - Summer 2019

As a Child Neurology Residency Program Director, I am excited to further expand the educational efforts of the PCN for other program directors through the creation of an ongoing webinar for all members of the Professors of Child Neurology.  By combining our shared knowledge and experience through this webinar, I believe that we can strengthen all our programs.

My initial principal goal to better establish this webinar will be a series to address resident wellness and resilience in Child Neurology and Neurodevelopmental Disability Training.  As you all know, burnout peaks during residency and remains a significant factor for many throughout their career.  As such, part of residency training must include helping to recognize burnout, to identify and address the drivers, and to teach skills to build resilience and wellness. Our upcoming PCN meeting will be touching on these topics, and I would encourage you to make plans to attend.

While I hope that this webinar series might help to do all these things, there remains a lot of unknowns specific to Child Neurology and NDD resident training to include the frequency of burnout, factors specific to this specialty training affecting wellness and resilience, and best methods to facilitate curriculum development in this area. Therefore, the webinar has an additional goal to define these statistics.  To do this, I would like to introduce this series with a survey that will help to define perceived rates of burnout by residency program leadership, identify unique drivers for child neurology and NDD residents, and to get a general sense of current wellness activities that programs have established.  By completing this survey, I will assume that you are interested in participating in this webinar series, and you will be added to the invitation list.

Beyond this introductory series, I would like to continue scheduled webinars to address other issues that we all share as residency programs.  This could include discussions regarding building interest in child neurology, novel curricular activities, engaging residents in advocacy, helping struggling residents, etc.  It could also be a forum to provide notice of open positions for residency, fellowship, or junior faculty.