Fellowships in Pediatrics

Our faculty members view fellowship education as the first and most important step in transferring our academic mission to the next generation of health care professionals. Currently, more than 90 postdoctoral trainees work in the subspecialty training programs overseen by the various divisions.

Potential career tracks for these young pediatricians include:

Clinician-investigators
Teachers
Subspecialty consultants
Contributors in the fields of pediatric medicine and developmental biology

Balancing Education and Clinical Service

The style of postgraduate education changed phenomenally over the past decade, prompted by recognition of some unfortunate facts surrounding the apprenticeship system used for more than a century. Residencies and fellowships often shortchanged education in the interest of clinical service.

This new understanding resulted in academic institutions developing guidelines to help protect the integrity of the educational environment. Although welcomed by the academic community, these guidelines make it no less difficult to strike a proper balance between clinical responsibility and the demands of learning and research.
Goals Build Essential Skills
Our Department sees great opportunity in these developments. We believe fellowships must accomplish three key goals -- each one focused on building essential skills that benefit residents and fellows:
- Proficiency – Prepare them both cognitively and technically to practice their new discipline.
- Capability – Build analytical skills and critical thinking that enables them to successfully to confront new conditions or situations.
- Curiosity – Stimulate a strong desire to advance knowledge through research and teaching.
To facilitate the pursuit of these goals, every division in the Department develops a training program that provides clinical experience while also exposing fellows to research and providing the means to translate inquiring into scholarship. All the subspecialty programs are certified by the Residency Review Committee of the Accreditation Council of Graduate Medical Education and contain clinical and research experiences as set forth in guidelines from the American Board of Pediatrics for subspecialty training.

Additional Educational Opportunities for Fellows

We also offer a rich array of seminars, conferences, research opportunities, and core facilities to complement the activities specific program.

We encourage fellows to participate in local and national study programs like these:

Fellowships from the Pediatric Scientist Training Program	Awards and fellowship grants from subspecialty and research societies and the American Academy of Pediatrics	UT Southwestern Medical School’s Physician Scientist Training Program (PSTP)
K awards from the NIH or analogous mentored research grants	Training curriculum in patient-oriented research (TCPOR) in clinical departments

Interdisciplinary Program Enriches Learning
In 2004, the Department established a unique interdisciplinary program for fellowship education. Its objective: develop a departmental repository of educational and administrative resources for the enrichment of individual fellowships.

Uses input from the fellows and individual fellowship program directors to:
- Maintain a bimonthly conference directed toward meeting the core requirements of the ACGME for all training programs.
- Provides a site for the presentation of fellow and faculty research.
- Creates an opportunity for social interaction or general discussions between the fellows.