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Part 5: Essentials of Neonatal-Perinatal Medicine Fellowship: evaluation of competence and proficiency using Milestones

Abstract

The Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education (ACGME) Pediatric Subspecialty Milestone Project competencies are used for Neonatal-Perinatal Medicine (NPM) fellows. Milestones are longitudinal markers that range from novice to expert (levels 1–5). There is no standard approach to the required biannual evaluation of fellows by fellowship programs, resulting in significant variability among programs regarding procedural experience and exposure to pathology during clinical training. In this paper, we discuss the opportunities that Milestones provide, potential strategies to address challenges, and future directions.

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Fig. 1: National Milestone Data for Benchmarking Fellow Performance.

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Each contributing author was responsible for writing a section of the manuscript. The manuscript was compiled by first author and group edited by the authors over several Zoom meetings. Senior author wrote a portion of the manuscript and provided oversight for editing. First author finalized edits and references, submitted manuscript, and corresponded with journal editor.

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Correspondence to Melissa M. Carbajal.

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Carbajal, M.M., Dadiz, R., Sawyer, T. et al. Part 5: Essentials of Neonatal-Perinatal Medicine Fellowship: evaluation of competence and proficiency using Milestones. J Perinatol 42, 809–814 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41372-021-01306-0

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