Tag Archives: fellowship

Why this is a great time to pursue a career in regional anesthesia

When you start saying “Back when I was in training…”, you are officially old.

Well, back when I was in training, I didn’t think regional anesthesia was a career path. We weren’t using ultrasound yet, and catheters were still experimental. Regional anesthesia was just part of anesthesiology, and there was a fairly limited set of blocks to offer patients. Besides spinals and epidurals, I was fortunate to learn how to do more peripheral techniques than most residents in my cohort: the femoral nerve block; proximal and distal sciatic nerve block; brachial plexus blocks (interscalene, infraclavicular, and axillary); and paravertebral block. All of these blocks were performed using landmarks to guide needle placement, and we used indirect needle tip position endpoints for confirmation (e.g. nerve stimulation or paresthesia).

Fast forward to today, and the subspecialty field of regional anesthesia and acute pain medicine (RAAPM) has exploded! The demand for better perioperative pain control that doesn’t depend solely on opioids has driven the development of advanced clinical fellowships in RAAPM for anesthesiologists who want to become acute pain medicine experts. A consortium of 14 medical organizations representing anesthesiology, pain medicine, surgical specialties, and hospitals has unanimously agreed on a set of principles to guide acute perioperative pain management, and included in these principles is access to a pain medicine specialist and the employment of multimodal analgesia with regional anesthesia techniques when indicated.

What does this mean for medical students and anesthesiology residents who are thinking about their careers? The future of RAAPM is bright! Considering that physicians work for about 30 years or more after completion of training, it’s really important to find a specialty, and even a subspecialty, that: 1) allows you to take good care of patients and be the kind of doctor you’ve been called to be; and 2) continues to evolve in innovative ways so you can keep learning new and exciting things.

I’ve written before about how much I love being an anesthesiologist, but I really love being a RAAPM subspecialist! There is nothing more satisfying than preventing and treating pain for patients who are undergoing surgery or suffering from traumatic injury. Today’s RAAPM fellowship curriculum trains anesthesiology residency graduates over the course of one year to become leaders with the knowledge and skills to perform a wide range of advanced procedures and manage acute pain services in any practice setting. New procedures to extend the benefits of regional analgesia beyond the first few postoperative days are currently being studied, as are new models of care such as transitional pain services that can add significant value to healthcare systems.

After fellowship is over, you join an incredible worldwide community of RAAPM experts who will support and mentor you throughout your career. Conferences feel like family reunions, and the leaders in the field whom you’ve looked up to become your friends.

To learn more about our RAAPM fellowship at Stanford, please visit our website. Information on other programs is available through ASRA Pain Medicine.

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Practical Tips for Successful Virtual Fellowship Interviews

Guest authored by Jody C. Leng, MD, MS, and Kariem El-Boghdadly, MBBS, BSc (Hons), FRCA, EDRA, MSc. Dr. Leng is a Clinical Assistant Professor at Stanford University School of Medicine and is the Director of Regional Anesthesiology and Acute Pain Medicine at the Veterans Affairs Palo Alto Health Care System. Dr. El-Boghdadly is a consultant anaesthetist and the research and development lead for anaesthesia and perioperative medicine at Guy’s and St Thomas’ NHS Foundation Trust and is an honorary senior lecturer at King’s College in London.

The Covid-19 pandemic has normalized virtual everything. For both interviewers and interviewees, participating in virtual interviews for subspecialty fellowship programs has required major adjustment. We have summarized some key lessons we have learned in preparing for our second year in a row of virtual regional anesthesiology and acute pain medicine fellowship interviews in the following infographic.

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A Year Ends and a New One Begins

This academic year was truly like no other.

At the end of July, we graduated three new physician experts in regional anesthesiology and acute pain medicine (RAAPM), and I could not be more proud of them! From our welcome party in the summer of 2019 to a year’s worth of teaching sessions, socials, and medical missions to the opening of the new Stanford hospital, the #COVID19 pandemic and #BlackLivesMatter movement – what a year for our amazing grads! Check out this fantastic graduation video from Dr. Jody Leng:

Our graduating fellows surprised me with the honor of being their Teacher of the Year along with Dr. Ryan Derby! It is such a privilege to be part of our fellows’ training every year and see them grow into physician consultants with RAAPM expertise.

Our new fellows are off to a strong start and are now officially part of our Stanford RAAPM family! If you are interested in learning more about our fellowship program, please visit our fellowship website and contact me with any questions.

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A New Era for Regional Anesthesiology and Acute Pain Medicine

It has finally happened–the inaugural class of ACGME-accredited Regional Anesthesiology and Acute Pain Medicine (RAAPM) fellowships has been announced, marking the beginning of a new era.

Congratulations to the following 9 programs that now are the first accredited fellowship programs representing this subspecialty in the United States:

  1. Stanford University
  2. Cedars-Sinai Medical Center
  3. University of California, San Francisco
  4. Massachusetts General Hospital
  5. Brigham and Women’s Hospital
  6. Montefiore Medical Center/Albert Einstein College of Medicine
  7. Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai/St. Luke’s-Roosevelt Hospital
  8. Duke University Hospital
  9. Vanderbilt University Medical Center

Accreditation is immediate and retroactive to the current 2016-17 academic year. This announcement represents a tremendous achievement in anesthesiology training and medical education in general.  Nearly 4 years ago, at our spring RAAPM fellowship directors meeting in 2013, I was appointed to lead the task force that would eventually make contact with the ACGME to request consideration for accreditation of our subspecialty fellowship programs. After submitting the 161-page letter to ACGME, we waited nearly a year to receive a response, and it was positive. The next 2 years were spent drafting the program requirements that would eventually be used as the basis for fellowship design and evaluation. This was an iterative process with multiple revisions based on solicited feedback and public commentary.

When the application period opened for the first time ever in October 2016, programs interested in applying had less than 2 months to prepare their program information forms and other materials, have them reviewed and approved by their local graduate medical education offices, and submit to ACGME in time for the 2017 spring review.

These 9 accredited programs have embarked on a brave new path, but it will not be an easy one. Their programs will be reviewed periodically to evaluate adherence to the program requirements and the quality of fellowship training, and deficiencies identified will need to be resolved or face loss of accreditation. However, their commitment to maintaining accreditation represents, in my opinion, a commitment to their fellows that they will provide a training experience that can be held as a benchmark for all programs.

We need our fellowship training programs to develop leaders in regional anesthesiology and acute pain medicine who can catalyze changes in healthcare that will improve patient outcomes and experience. Today, we have taken a huge step forward.

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The Future of Acute Pain Medicine Training

AVC.Pain_We all know that not all pain is the same. While chronic pain can sometimes be palliated, “acute” pain (new onset, often with an identifiable cause) must be aggressively managed and, ideally, eliminated. This requires a systems-based approach led by physicians dedicated to understanding acute pain pathophysiology and investigating new ways to treat it. 

In December 2013, I submitted a 161-page letter to the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education (ACGME) requesting that regional anesthesiology and acute pain medicine be considered for fellowship accreditation, with a lot of help from a small group of fellowship directors and colleagues from obstetric anesthesiology who recently went through the ACGME accreditation process for their fellowships. With no requests for further information, the Board of Directors of the ACGME informed me in the fall of 2014 that Regional Anesthesiology and Acute Pain Medicine (RAAPM) will be the next accredited subspecialty fellowship within the core discipline of Anesthesiology.  The draft program requirements have been posted online for public comments.  After the comment period, these program requirements will be revised and then finalized for posting by the ACGME. At that point, which may be as early as the end of this year, institutions with RAAPM fellowships will be invited to apply for accreditation.

I have received many questions from ASRA members about this process to date, so below I have provided some of my answers to the most common ones:

Why do we need “another” fellowship dedicated to pain medicine?  Although we already have a board-certified subspecialty of Pain Medicine within Anesthesiology, there is a growing demand for physicians who specialize in hospital-based acute pain medicine. For Pain Medicine fellows, the required “Acute Pain Inpatient Experience” may be satisfied by documented involvement with a minimum of only 50 new patients and the spectrum of pain diagnoses and treatments that they are required to learn during one year is vast. Further, Pain Medicine is a board-certified subspecialty of Emergency Medicine, Family Medicine, Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation, and Psychiatry and Neurology, in addition to Anesthesiology; graduates from any of these residency programs can be accepted into the one-year Pain Medicine fellowship and will not be as familiar with surgical or trauma-induced acute pain as an anesthesiology residency graduate. Anesthesiology is a hospital-based medical specialty, and anesthesiologists are physicians who focus on a  daily basis on the prevention and treatment of pain for their patients who undergo surgery, suffer trauma, or present for childbirth. History also supports the evolution of acute pain medicine through anesthesiology. The concept of an anesthesiology-led acute pain management service was described first in 1988 (1), but arguably the techniques employed in modern acute pain medicine and regional anesthesiology date back to Gaston Labat’s publication of Regional Anesthesia: Its Technic and Clinical Application in 1922, with advancement and refinement of this subspecialty in the 1960s and 1970s (2-6). Finally, a recent survey study shows that the great majority (83.7%) of practicing pain physicians in the United States focus only on chronic pain (7).

Why do anesthesiology residency graduates still need to do a fellowship in RAAPM? By the time they complete the core residency in anesthesiology today, not all residents have gained sufficient clinical experience to provide optimal care for the complete spectrum of issues experienced by patients suffering from acutely painful conditions, including the ability to reliably provide advanced interventional techniques proven to be effective in managing pain in the acute setting (8-12). We need physician leaders who can run acute pain medicine teams and design systems to provide individualized, comprehensive, and timely pain management for both medical and surgical patients in the hospital, expeditiously managing requests for assistance when pain intensity levels exceed those set forth in quality standards, or to prevent pain intensity from reaching such levels. The mission statement for the Acute Pain Medicine Special Interest Group within the American Academy of Pain Medicine provides clear justification.

Will RAAPM fellowship graduates get jobs when they are done? Although no one can make this guarantee, there are good reasons to think that there will be growing demand for RAAPM graduates in the future. In a survey of fellowship graduates and academic chairs published in 2005, 61 of 132 of academic chairs responded (46%), noting that future staffing models for their department will likely include an average of two additional faculty trained in regional anesthesiology and acute pain medicine (13). RAAPM fellowship graduates are the only physicians who can say that their subspecialty training is entirely dedicated to improving the patient experience. The Hospital Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems (HCAHPS) survey is administered to a random sample of patients who have received inpatient care and receive government insurance through Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS). The survey consists of 32 questions and is intended to assess the “patient experience of care” domain in the value-based purchasing program. A hospital’s survey scores are publicly disclosed and make up 30% of the formula used to determine how much of its diagnosis-related group payment withholding will be paid by CMS at the end of each year. Of the 32 questions, 7 directly or indirectly relate to in-hospital pain management.

Are we ready for accreditation? Currently, there are over 60 institutions in the United States and Canada that list themselves as having nonaccredited fellowship training programs focused on RAAPM on the ASRA website. Since 2002, the group of regional anesthesiology and acute pain medicine fellowship directors has been meeting twice yearly at the ASRA Annual Spring Meeting and the American Society of Anesthesiologists (ASA) Annual Meeting in the fall. Despite not being an ACGME-accredited fellowship, this group, has been voluntarily engaged in developing and refining training guidelines as the foundation for the fellowship. These guidelines, originally published in Regional Anesthesia and Pain Medicine in 2005 (14) with a revision in 2011 (15) have been recently released as the third edition (16). Formal ACGME program requirements will serve as a measuring stick to hopefully ensure that the certificates that RAAPM fellowship graduates receive from all accredited programs will share some common value.

As with other medical subspecialties, acute pain medicine has emerged due to the need for trained specialists—in this case, those who possess the knowledge, skills, and abilities to efficiently manage a high volume of inpatient consultations, anticipate the analgesic needs of a wide range of patients based on preoperative risk, use a multimodal approach to manage and prevent pain when possible, and aggressively treat severe acute pain when it occurs to prevent it from transitioning into chronic pain. The RAAPM fellowship graduate must be a physician leader who is capable of collaborating with other healthcare providers in anesthesiology, surgery, medicine, nursing, pharmacy, physical therapy, and more to establish multidisciplinary programs that add value and improve patient care in the hospital setting and beyond.

This article originally appeared in the February 2016 issue of ASRA News.  As of October 2016, the regional anesthesiology and acute pain medicine is the newest accredited subspecialty fellowship within anesthesiology, and programs may now apply for accreditation to the ACGME.

REFERENCES

  1. Ready LB, Oden R, Chadwick HS, Benedetti C, Rooke GA, Caplan R, Wild LM. Development of an anesthesiology-based postoperative pain management service. Anesthesiology. 1988; 68:100-6.
  2. Winnie AP, Ramamurthy S, Durrani Z. The inguinal paravascular technic of lumbar plexus anesthesia: the “3-in-1 block.” Anesth Analg. 1973; 52:989-96.
  3. Winnie AP, Collins VJ. The subclavian perivascular technique of brachial plexus anesthesia. Anesthesiology. 1964; 25:353-63.
  4. Raj PP, Montgomery SJ, Nettles D, Jenkins MT Infraclavicular brachial plexus block–a new approach. Anesth Analg. 1973; 52:897-904.
  5. Raj PP, Parks RI, Watson TD, Jenkins MT. A new single-position supine approach to sciatic-femoral nerve block. Anesth Analg. 1975; 54:489-93.
  6. Raj PP, Rosenblatt R, Miller J, Katz RL, Carden E. Dynamics of local-anesthetic compounds in regional anesthesia. Anesth Analg 1977; 56: 110-7.
  7. Breuer B, Pappagallo M, Tai JY, Portenoy RK. U.S. board-certified pain physician practices: uniformity and census data of their locations. J Pain. 2007; 8: 244-50.
  8. Buvanendran A, Kroin JS. Multimodal analgesia for controlling acute postoperative pain. Curr Opin Anaesthesiol. 2009; 22: 588-93.
  9. Hebl JR, Dilger JA, Byer DE, Kopp SL, Stevens SR, Pagnano MW, Hanssen AD, Horlocker TT. A pre-emptive multimodal pathway featuring peripheral nerve block improves perioperative outcomes after major orthopedic surgery. Reg Anesth Pain Med. 2008; 33: 510-7.
  10. Jin F, Chung F. Multimodal analgesia for postoperative pain control. J Clin Anesth. 2001; 13: 524-39.
  11. Kehlet H, Dahl JB. The value of “multimodal” or “balanced analgesia” in postoperative pain treatment. Anesth Analg. 1993; 77: 1048-56.
  12. Young A, Buvanendran A.Recent advances in multimodal analgesia. Anesthesiol Clin. 2012; 30: 91-100.
  13. Neal JM, Kopacz DJ, Liguori GA, Beckman JD, Hargett MJ. The training and careers of regional anesthesia fellows–1983-2002. Reg Anesth Pain Med. 2005; 30: 226-32.
  14. Hargett MJ, Beckman JD, Liguori GA, Neal JM. Guidelines for regional anesthesia fellowship training. Reg Anesth Pain Med. 2005; 30: 218-25.
  15. Regional Anesthesiology and Acute Pain Medicine Fellowship Directors Group. Guidelines for fellowship training in regional anesthesiology and acute pain medicine: second edition, 2010. Reg Anesth Pain Med. 2011; 36: 282-8.
  16. Regional Anesthesiology and Acute Pain Medicine Fellowship Directors Group. Guidelines for fellowship training in regional anesthesiology and acute pain medicine: third edition, 2014. Reg Anesth Pain Med. 2015; 40: 213-7.

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Why We Need Acute Pain Medicine Specialists

Not all pain is the same.

PainChronic pain can be palliated, but “acute” pain (new onset, often with an identifiable cause) must be stamped out. This requires a systems-based approach led by physicians dedicated to understanding acute pain pathophysiology and investigating new ways to treat it. The solution is definitely not giving more and more opioids.

As our understanding of pain mechanisms has evolved, select physicians have developed a special focus on pain in the acute injury/illness and perioperative settings that has led to the rapid advancement of systemic and site-specific interventions to effectively manage this type of pain. Acute pain medicine involves the routine use of multiple modalities concurrently (i.e., multimodal analgesia) in the in-hospital setting to reduce the intensity of acute pain and minimize the development of debilitating persistent pain, a problem that can result from even common surgical procedures or trauma. Unfortunately, the need for specialists in acute pain medicine is increasing.

In December of 2013, I submitted a 161 page letter to the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education (ACGME) requesting that regional anesthesiology and acute pain medicine be considered for fellowship accreditation with the help of my fellowship director colleagues. The Board of Directors of the ACGME informed me this past fall (2014) that they have approved our fellowship to be the next accredited subspecialty within anesthesiology.

Wait – don’t we already have a fellowship program in pain medicine? Yes we do, and this one year post-residency program does include the “Acute Pain Inpatient Experience.” However, this requirement may be satisfied by documented involvement with a minimum of only 50 new patients and is not the primary emphasis of fellowship training in the specialty. Pain medicine is a board-certified subspecialty of anesthesiology, physical medicine and rehabilitation, and psychiatry and neurology; graduates from any of these residency programs can apply to the one year program. In a recent survey study of practicing pain physicians in the United States with added qualification in pain management according to the American Board of Medical Specialties (ABMS), the great majority (83.7%) of respondents defined their practices as following “chronic pain patients longitudinally” (1).

There is clearly room and a need for a subspecialty training program in acute pain medicine that can focus on improving the in-hospital pain experience. Such a program should advance, in a positive and value-added fashion, the present continuum of training in pain medicine.

HCAHPS Pain QuestionsThe Hospital Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems (HCAHPS) survey is administered to a random sample of patients who have received inpatient care and receive government insurance through Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS). The survey consists of 32 questions and is intended to assess the “patient experience of care” domain in the value-based purchasing program. A hospital’s survey scores are publicly disclosed and make up 30% of the formula used to determine how much of its diagnosis-related group payment withholding will be paid by CMS at the end of each year. Of the 32 questions, 7 directly or indirectly relate to in-hospital pain management.

Why should acute pain medicine be a subspecialty of anesthesiology? Anesthesiology is a hospital-based medical specialty, and anesthesiologists are physicians who focus on the prevention and treatment of pain for their patients who undergo surgery, suffer trauma, or present for childbirth on a daily basis. For more details on the role of the anesthesiologist, please see “Physicians specializing in the patient experience.” Further, history supports the evolution of acute pain medicine through anesthesiology. The concept of an anesthesiology-led acute pain management service was described first in 1988 (2), but arguably the techniques employed in modern acute pain medicine and regional anesthesiology date back to Gaston Labat’s publication of Regional Anesthesia: its Technic and Clinical Application in 1922, with advancement and refinement of this subspecialty in the 1960s and 1970s (3-7).

By the time they complete the core residency in anesthesiology today, not all trainees have gained sufficient clinical experience to provide optimal care for the complete spectrum of issues experienced by patients suffering from acutely painful conditions, including the ability to reliably provide advanced interventional techniques proven to be effective in managing pain in the acute setting (8-12). We need physician leaders who can run acute pain medicine teams and design systems to provide individualized, comprehensive, and timely pain management for both medical and surgical patients in the hospital, expeditiously managing requests for assistance when pain intensity levels exceed those set forth in quality standards, or to prevent pain intensity from reaching such levels. The mission statement for the Acute Pain Medicine Special Interest Group within the American Academy of Pain Medicine provides additional justification.

In a survey of fellowship graduates and academic chairs published in 2005, 61 of 132 of academic chairs responded (46%), noting that future staffing models for their department will likely include an average of 2 additional faculty trained in regional anesthesiology and acute pain medicine (13).

Currently, there are over 60 institutions in the United States and Canada that list themselves as having non-accredited fellowship training programs focused on regional anesthesiology and acute pain medicine on the ASRA website. Since 2002, the group of regional anesthesiology and acute pain medicine fellowship directors has been meeting twice yearly at the ASRA Spring Annual Meeting and ASA Annual Meeting which takes place in the fall. Despite not being an ACGME-accredited fellowship, this group, recognizing the lack of formalized training guidelines, voluntarily began to develop such guidelines as the foundation for subspecialty fellowship training in existing and future programs. These guidelines were originally published in Regional Anesthesia and Pain Medicine in 2005 (14), then were subsequently reviewed, revised, and published as the 2nd edition in 2011 (15), and have been recently updated again (16).

As with other subspecialties, acute pain medicine has emerged due to the need for trained specialists—in this case, those who understand the complicated, multi-faceted disease processes of acute pain, and its potential continuity with chronic pain, and can apply appropriate medical and interventional treatment in a timely fashion. The fellowship-trained regional anesthesiologist and acute pain medicine specialist must be capable of collaborating with other healthcare providers in anesthesiology, surgery, medicine, nursing, pharmacy, physical therapy, and more to establish multidisciplinary programs that add value and improve patient care in the hospital setting and beyond.

REFERENCES

  1. Breuer B, Pappagallo M, Tai JY, Portenoy RK: U.S. board-certified pain physician practices: uniformity and census data of their locations. J Pain 2007; 8: 244-50
  2. Ready LB, Oden R, Chadwick HS, Benedetti C, Rooke GA, Caplan R, Wild LM: Development of an anesthesiology-based postoperative pain management service. Anesthesiology 1988; 68: 100-6
  3. Winnie AP, Ramamurthy S, Durrani Z: The inguinal paravascular technic of lumbar plexus anesthesia: the “3-in-1 block”. Anesth Analg 1973; 52: 989-96
  4. Winnie AP, Collins VJ: The Subclavian Perivascular Technique of Brachial Plexus Anesthesia. Anesthesiology 1964; 25: 353-63
  5. Raj PP, Montgomery SJ, Nettles D, Jenkins MT: Infraclavicular brachial plexus block–a new approach. Anesth Analg 1973; 52: 897-904
  6. Raj PP, Parks RI, Watson TD, Jenkins MT: A new single-position supine approach to sciatic-femoral nerve block. Anesth Analg 1975; 54: 489-93
  7. Raj PP, Rosenblatt R, Miller J, Katz RL, Carden E: Dynamics of local-anesthetic compounds in regional anesthesia. Anesth Analg 1977; 56: 110-7
  8. Buvanendran A, Kroin JS: Multimodal analgesia for controlling acute postoperative pain. Curr Opin Anaesthesiol 2009; 22: 588-93
  9. Hebl JR, Dilger JA, Byer DE, Kopp SL, Stevens SR, Pagnano MW, Hanssen AD, Horlocker TT: A pre-emptive multimodal pathway featuring peripheral nerve block improves perioperative outcomes after major orthopedic surgery. Reg Anesth Pain Med 2008; 33: 510-7
  10. Jin F, Chung F: Multimodal analgesia for postoperative pain control. J Clin Anesth 2001; 13: 524-39
  11. Kehlet H, Dahl JB: The value of “multimodal” or “balanced analgesia” in postoperative pain treatment. Anesth Analg 1993; 77: 1048-56
  12. Young A, Buvanendran A: Recent advances in multimodal analgesia. Anesthesiol Clin 2012; 30: 91-100
  13. Neal JM, Kopacz DJ, Liguori GA, Beckman JD, Hargett MJ: The training and careers of regional anesthesia fellows–1983-2002. Reg Anesth Pain Med 2005; 30: 226-32
  14. Hargett MJ, Beckman JD, Liguori GA, Neal JM: Guidelines for regional anesthesia fellowship training. Reg Anesth Pain Med 2005; 30: 218-25
  15. Guidelines for fellowship training in Regional Anesthesiology and Acute Pain Medicine: Second Edition, 2010. Reg Anesth Pain Med 2011; 36: 282-8
  16. Guidelines for fellowship training in Regional Anesthesiology and Acute Pain Medicine: Third Edition, 2014. Reg Anesth Pain Med 2015; 40: 213-7

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