Background/Purpose:
Mentoring is considered a critical contributor to career success in academic medicine. Recognizing that pediatric rheumatologists may experience limited access to mentoring due to the small size of most clinical programs, the American College of Rheumatology (ACR) and Childhood Arthritis and Rheumatology Research Alliance (CARRA) cooperatively developed a subspecialty-wide inter-institutional mentoring program, entitled the ACR/CARRA Mentoring Interest Group (AMIGO). We report outcomes of this initiative three years after its inception as a small pilot program in 2011.
Methods:
Two distinct sets of surveys were conducted: (1) AMIGO participants in the pilot phase were surveyed 17 months after matching to characterize mentor-mentee contact, and results compared with a subsequent survey of all participants following full program implementation. (2) All US/Canadian pediatric rheumatologists were surveyed before and after implementation of AMIGO to identify global changes in mentorship over this interval.
Results:
(1) Participants in the pilot phase (19 dyads) and general implementation phase (112 dyads) reported comparable experiences with AMIGO, including success in establishing contact and suitability of mentor-mentee pairing. Pilot and general roll-out participants reported similar anticipated benefit from the program.
(2) Respondents in the community wide surveys included 180 pediatric rheumatologists in 2011 and 177 in 2014, with comparable demographics. Among survey respondents, 31/36 fellows (86%), 17/58 junior faculty (29%), and 37/61 (61%) senior faculty reported participation in the AMIGO program. Over the interval from 2011 to 2014, overall satisfaction with mentoring increased for fellows (p=0.01) but not junior faculty. AMIGO mentees reported that participation in AMIGO provided benefit in the domains of research/scholarship (30/51, 61%), career development (35/51, 71%), work-life balance (21/51, 43%), and connectedness to the pediatric rheumatology community (33/61, 56%).
Conclusion:
The AMIGO program has expanded successfully from its pilot phase and now serves the large majority of US and Canadian pediatric rheumatology fellows as well as many junior faculty members. AMIGO mentees reported benefit in the domains of research, career development, and work-life balance. Institution of AMIGO was associated with improved satisfaction with mentoring among fellows, where program penetration was greatest. These results confirm that a subspecialty-wide inter-institutional mentoring program is feasible and can translate into concrete gains measurable at the level of the whole community.
Disclosure:
L. N. Moorthy,
None;
E. Muscal,
None;
M. P. Riebschleger,
None;
K. A. Rouster-Stevens,
None;
P. J. Ferguson,
None;
R. Schneider,
None;
M. Klein-Gitelman,
None;
H. I. Brunner,
None;
A. Huttenlocher,
None;
P. A. Nigrovic,
None.
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ACR Meeting Abstracts - https://acrabstracts.org/abstract/process-outcomes-and-community-wide-efficacy-of-the-amigo-inter-institutional-mentoring-initiative-within-pediatric-rheumatology/