Background/Purpose: In pediatric rheumatology, the small size of many academic programs translates into limited mentoring options for early career physicians. To address this “mentorship gap,” the American College of Rheumatology (ACR) and the Childhood Arthritis and Rheumatology Research Alliance (CARRA) joined together to develop AMIGO, the ACR/CARRA Mentoring Interest Group, that now enrolls more than 80 pediatric rheumatology fellows and junior faculty in the US and Canada. We report program evaluation data from the AMIGO pilot project, launched in November 2011 with 20 mentor-mentee dyads.
Methods: Mentees and mentors participating in the AMIGO pilot phase were surveyed via online questionnaire 17 months after initial match to determine dynamics of contact and perceived benefit in domains relevant to professional success and work-life balance.
Results: Of 20 initial matches, 19 were still functioning while one had dissolved due to departure of the mentee from North America. Ninety-five percent of the participants reported at least two substantial interactions. Total mentoring time was estimated at under 60 minutes by approximately half of respondents, though 20% reported more than 3 hours of interaction. Thirty-one percent of participants rated the quality of the match as good and 51% as excellent (defined as ‘excellent overlap of mentee needs and mentor experience’). All mentees considered the mentoring helpful in providing career guidance, with substantial benefit also in scholarship, and job satisfaction. Benefits reported by mentors included improvement of their mentoring skills and development of their academic portfolios. Both mentees and mentors reported improved connectedness to the wider pediatric rheumatology community. All participants favored continuation of the program (Table 1).
Table 1. Pilot survey data at 17 months after initiation of a mentoring program
|
|
Mentees (n, %) |
Mentors (n, %) |
Overall (n, %) |
|
Responses (%) |
18/19 (95) |
19/19 (100) |
37/38 (97) |
|
Benefit to mentee |
|
|
|
|
Career path/job search |
18 (100) |
13 (68) |
31 (84) |
|
Research/scholarship |
12 (67) |
10 (53) |
22 (59) |
|
Job satisfaction |
13 (72) |
12/17 (71) |
25/35 (71) |
|
Work-life balance |
8 (44) |
12/18 (67) |
20/36 (56) |
|
Benefit to mentors |
|
|
|
|
Mentoring skills |
NA |
12/18 (67) |
NA |
|
Professional portfolio |
NA |
8/17 (47) |
NA |
|
Enhanced connection to community |
14/17 (82) |
14 (75) |
28/36 (78) |
|
Should AMIGO be continued? |
18 (100) |
19 (100) |
37 (100) |
Conclusion: The success of the pilot AMIGO program indicates that a North American inter-institutional mentoring program in pediatric rheumatology is feasible. Participants identified benefits to both mentees and mentors in multiple domains, most prominently in career guidance, a core goal of the program. Although longer-term evaluation of the full AMIGO program is needed, the success of the pilot program suggests that AMIGO could serve as a model for mentoring more broadly within the ACR and potentially in other medical subspecialties.
Disclosure:
P. A. Nigrovic,
Baxter Healthcare,
2,
Novartis Pharmaceutical Corporation,
5;
E. Muscal,
None;
L. N. Moorthy,
None;
S. Prahalad,
None;
M. S. Klein-Gitelman,
None;
M. P. Riebschleger,
None;
B. A. Eberhard,
None;
R. Schneider,
None.
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ACR Meeting Abstracts - https://acrabstracts.org/abstract/pilot-phase-outcomes-from-the-acrcarra-inter-institutional-mentoring-program-in-pediatric-rheumatology/