The fields of quality improvement and patient safety (QI/PS) continue to grow with greater attention and awareness, increased mandates and incentives, and more research. Academic medical centers and their academic departments have a long-standing tradition for innovation and scholarship within a multifaceted mission to provide patient care, educate the next generation, and conduct research. Aca...

This study aimed at evaluating the results, direct costs and investment of a training program on microbiological test material collection at a teaching hospital. Test collections that did not follow the established criteria (failure) were considered as the result measure. Variable and absorption costing were used to calculate direct costs and investments, respectively. Of the 11,893 collected m...

Opportunities to advance one's knowledge and position are available within the clinical laboratory arena. By obtaining a specialist credential in chemistry, hematology or microbiology, a laboratorian has demonstrated advance knowledge and ability in their respective discipline. These specialist certifications open doors within and outside the laboratory profession and may lead to promotion. The...

Innovation and change in postgraduate medical education programs affects teaching hospital organizations, since medical education and clinical service are interrelated.Recent trends towards flexible, time-independent and individualized educational programs put pressure on this relationship. This pressure may lead to organizational uncertainty, unbalance and friction making it an important issue...

Several training programs sponsored by the NIH/Fogarty International Center's International Research Ethics Education and Curriculum Development Program offer online graduate-level courses in research ethics to participants in lowand middle-income countries. This paper describes the evaluation of four of these online courses and recommendations for improvements to achieve the highest-quality de...

Traditional underrepresented minority (URM) groups (African Americans, Hispanic Americans, Native Americans) remain underrepresented among physician-scientists. To address the dearth of URM physician-scientists, in 1993 the Weill Cornell/Rockefeller/Sloan Kettering Tri-Institutional MD-PhD Program developed a pipeline program, Gateways to the Laboratory (Gateways), which focuses on increasing t...

In this issue of IOVS, Ambati and Cahoon 1 provide thoughtful suggestions for increasing the number and success of medical doctors (MDs) who run active research programs. My own observations over the past 2 decades concur with those of Ambati and Cahoon: our current Medical Scientist Training Program (MSTP) has failed to provide sufficient numbers of physician/scientists to assure that importan...

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVES Peritoneal dialysis (PD) depends on timely and skilled placement of a PD catheter (PDC). Most PDCs are placed surgically, but little is known about the residency training of surgeons in this procedure. Inadequate residency training could limit surgical expertise in PDCs, resulting in high complication rates that discourage PD use. This study assessed surgical PDC train...