Spring 2008 Newsletter Article

COME JOIN US FOR BREAKFAST!

The Advocacy Training SIG welcomes faculty, coordinators, and trainees who are involved with and/or interested in community pediatrics and advocacy training.

For those with more experience in this arena, please come share your wisdom, connect with fellow colleagues, and inspire others.

May 3rd, 7-10am. HCC, Room 303B

Our Agenda this year has a great line-up of speakers and interactive sessions, as well as our annual resident advocacy presentations and posters. David Keller is speaking about developing an academic career in child advocacy, and Jeffrey Kaczorowski will be presenting results from the CPTI chief resident needs assessment on community health and advocacy training. Advocacy training experts will lead a Consultation Clinic on Building/Reshaping a community health and advocacy curriculum. Lastly, we will have our Resident Community Health and Advocacy Spotlight (The Highlight of the SIG!)

Spring 2008 Newsletter Article

The Continuity SIG will be meeting Monday, May 5 from 9 to 11 o’clock. E komo mai! Hawaii will be a great backdrop as we will learn about new happenings with CORNET, our research network, and new opportunities in communicating with each other. We plan to involve our membership in an effort to revise and distribute an updated continuity directors manual. The RRC and the continuity experience is always a hot topic and this year will be no different. Sharing site visit experiences and addressing new ways we may be able to document the experience for the RRC based on work we did at last year’s meeting along with work by small groups since that time. An important summary will be distributed on the listserv prior to the meeting, so please keep “a weather eye” open for that. We plan to break into small groups to talk more about how we might implement new documentation strategies taking into account the diversity of continuity experiences that exist. We hope that our discussion will help shape the way the RRC will address documentation of the continuity experience in the future. We also want to call your attention to a great workshop that will take place before the SIG meeting: “What’s Going On in Continuity Clinic? Clinical and Educational Research with CORNET” will be presented by Bill Stratbucker and colleagues on Saturday, May 3, from 2-4 PM. A hui hou!

Spring 2008 newsletter Article

The APA Faculty Development SIG invites you to an exciting meeting in Hawaii

The APA Faculty development SIG will meet on SUNDAY MAY 4, 2008 in the Hawaii Convention Center, Room 302B from 8:00 AM – 11:00 AM

This meeting will have 2 parts:

Part 1: A breakout session for novices and experienced faculty developers. The novice group will tackle the difficult problems of getting a program started and addressing the needs of your faculty. The experienced group will discuss what’s new in faculty development and the latest trends in the field.

Part 2: A seminar on mentoring by Mary Ellen Gusic and Mimi Bar-on. They will focus on the questions of what is mentoring, what are the logistics of mentoring and what are the goals of mentoring? The seminar will be interactive and your questions and comments are welcome.

Please make time in your busy PAS schedule to join us for this exciting SIG.

Spring 2008 newsletter Article

Accreditation of academic general pediatric (AGP) fellowships is coming!

Please join us on Sunday, May 4, 8-10 am for an exciting program at the SIG meeting in Hawaii. We welcome and encourage all fellowship faculty, fellows, graduates of fellowship programs, and anyone passionate about fellowship training to attend.

This year's meeting will focus on timely opportunities to advance AGP fellowship training. 1) Peter Szilagyi will present the upcoming APA review and accreditation process for AGP fellowship programs. 2)Paul Darden will discuss setting up a unified application and match system for AGP fellowship programs. 3) Tina Cheng will talk about measuring performance outcomes for fellows, advocacy efforts, and other steps we must take to sustain and increase funding for fellowship programs 4) Anne Duggan will discuss what we can learn from general internal medicine and family medicine fellowship programs to strategize across primary care disciplines. 5) Finally we have called on SIG members to share curricular innovations from their fellowship programs.

These discussions promise to be lively ones, and input from all involved in fellowship training is critical. The SIG meeting will be followed from 10-11 am by a meeting for fellows only, organized and led by fellows.

Fellowship Directors SIG
Paul Darden, Iris Borowsky

Spring 2008 newsletter Article

INJURY CONTROL SPECIAL INTEREST GROUP

Through the Injury Control SIG we: 1) present highlights on new injury control findings or research methodology; 2) allow injury control researchers to discover new resources to aid their work; and 3) foster collaboration among injury control researchers.

The Injury Control SIG will meet again in Honolulu during the PAS meetings (Tuesday, May 6, 2008 0700-1000 am). Our keynote speaker is Dr. Val Kalei Kanuha, from the University of Hawaii, discussing her research on interpersonal violence with special emphasis on the methods she uses working with Pacific Islander and Native Hawaiian communities. We will also feature a panel of local injury experts to help us place injury prevention in a Hawaiian context. And, of course, we will be presenting our annual trainee research award. Don’t miss this session!

New SIG Co-Chairs
One important item of business at the next meeting will be selection of new co-chairs for the Injury Control SIG. If you are interested in this position – or know of someone who might be – please send a note to Shari Barkin, MD, MSHS (shari.barkin@vanderbilt.edu ) or Brian Johnston, MD, MPH (bdj@u.washington.edu ). We will accept nominations until the start of the SIG meeting in Honolulu.

Highlight on new injury control finding or research methodology. Causal diagrams or “directed acyclic graphs” are a useful tool for specifying the relationship between variables in an observational study. Mapping these relationships has distinct advantages: it forces clarity in describing the role of moderating and mediating variables; it identifies situations in which control of potential confounders may introduce, rather than remove, bias; and it promotes transparency in the selection of an analytic plan. In the most basic sense, use of causal diagrams forces decisions about analysis to be based on clinical or contextual understanding of the relationship among variables. A useful overview is Glymour MM. Using causal diagrams to understand common problems in social epidemiology in Methods in Social Epidemiology, Oakes M, and Kaufman J, eds. Jossey-Bass. (2006). For an example of the use of this approach in an injury study, see Paulson EH, Gerberich SG, Alexander BH, et al. Fall-related injuries among agricultural household members: Regional Rural Injury Study II (RRIS-II). J Occup Environ Med. 2006 Sep;48(9):959-68 New resources Looking for the evidence base of injury control? The Cochrane Injuries Group (http://www.cochrane-injuries.lshtm.ac.uk/) conducts and publishes systematic reviews covering the prevention, treatment and rehabilitation of traumatic injury, including the emergency resuscitation of seriously injured and burned patients. There are currently 79 completed reviews from this work group. The Injuries Group welcomes new members as authors, reviewers or editors.

Intimate Partner Violence and Sexual Violence Victimization Assessment Instruments for Use in Healthcare Settings is a compilation of existing tools for assessing intimate partner violence in clinical settings. The compilation provides a current inventory of screening and assessment tools for use with specific populations. Available from the CDC NCIPC online at http://www.cdc.gov/NCIPC/pub-res/ipv_and_sv_screening.htm

Upcoming Meetings
Ninth World Conference on Injury Prevention and Safety Promotion, Safety 2008. March 15-18, 2008. Merida, Yucatan, Mexico (http://www.safety2008mx.info/) 2008 Joint Annual Meeting of STIPDA & CDC Core State Injury Grantees “Give Them Something to Talk About: Making Our Messages Stick” Oklahoma City, OK. April 20-23, 2008 (http://www.stipda.org/)

Spring 2008 newsletter Article

The Medical Informatics SIG will be bright and early but it’s a great way to start the 2008 PAS meeting. We will meet Saturday May 3rd from 7-10 AM in the Convention Center Room 308. The "Medical Informatics Round Robin" will be expanded where members briefly speak about their ongoing medical informatics projects and then (usually quite lively) discussion happens among all the members. The discussions cover the oceanfront including clinical, educational and research informatics projects. We encourage anyone who is interested in using computers in medicine to join the meeting and the SIG. You don’t have to be a technical person to be a member; many of us aren’t! If you have ideas, suggestions, comments or questions, please contact Donna D’Alessandro at donna-dalessandro@uiowa.edu

Spring 2008 newsletter Article

During the last 10 months, the newborn nursery list serve has addressed a number of questions by looking at various practices in the newborn nursery. Members have polled our nurseries for the use of CRP in evaluating for sepsis, coverage of the nursery by residents and attending and screening for drug exposure in the newborn. We have a wide range of practices at our programs and the new approaches in these areas celebrate the diversity of our SIG. Information on the practices has enriched my practice and caused me to rethink some time honored practices in light of evidence and other's practices.

Bonny Whalen has been working with the Educational Committee in developing goals, objective, and teaching modules for the newborn rotation in light of the APA Educational Guidelines, ABP guidelines and ACGME requirements. She plans to share the completed modules at the Hawaii meeting and would appreciate more participation in the project. You may contact her at Boony.L.Whalen@HITCHCOCK.ORG.

Mark Vining of University of Massachusettes and Tony Burgos of Stanford have completed their car seat survey of current practice and plan to present the data at the Hawaii meeting. Car seat trails has created many questions in the nursery as we follow the AAP guideline for testing. Come to our session and hear the state of current practice.

Bryan Burke of the University of Arizona presented a Grand Rounds on the Myths in the Newborn Nursery and practice in light of evidence. He will provide an overview of the myths in breastfeeding and how to change the teaching environment in the nursery.

Elizabeth Simpson of Kansas City has develop a curriculum for teaching newborn circumcision in the nursery using models prior to procedure. She will demonstrate her method for our SIG and each member will have time to practice the technique.

Tony Burgos of Stanford will join Mark Vining as co-chair after the Hawaii meeting.

Written by:
Linda Meloy lmeloy@mail2.vcu.edu
Mark Vining viningm@ummhc.org

Spring 2008 newsletter Article

APA Pediatric Tobacco Issues SIG Report Spring 2008

The Pediatric Tobacco Issues SIG (CigSIG) is an open and welcoming group of individuals interested in all aspects of how tobacco influences kids: from secondhand tobacco smoke prevention, to adolescent tobacco prevention and cessation, to parental smoking cessation, to policy changes reducing tobacco’s impact on children and families. Our current members have wide ranges of experience, and our annual meeting is a great opportunity to learn highlights of new research and policies, discover new resources for research and practice, and foster collaboration among researchers, practitioners and trainees. Members receive periodic updates via listserv on tobacco topics throughout the year.

2008 is already proving to be a lively year in tobacco control, with an updated Tobacco Treatment Guideline about to be released (in May) and a Food and Drug Administration (FDA) Tobacco Bill which will be in mark-up in the House (H.R. 1108) in the next few weeks. The bill would grant the FDA the authority to:

• Restrict tobacco advertising and promotions, especially to children.
• Stop illegal sales of tobacco products to children.
• Ban candy-flavored cigarettes.
• Require changes in tobacco products, such as the removal of certain harmful ingredients or the reduction of nicotine levels.
• Prohibit health claims about so-called "reduced risk" products that are not scientifically proven or that would discourage current tobacco users from quitting or encourage new users to start.
• Require tobacco companies to disclose the contents of tobacco products, changes to their products and research about the health effects of their products.
• Require larger and more informative health warnings on tobacco products.
• Prohibit terms such as "light", "mild" and "low-tar" that mislead consumers into believing that certain cigarettes are safer than others.

This year’s annual meeting of the CigSIG will be in Hawaii on Monday May 5, 9am-noon. Please join us for an exciting morning of networking, idea sharing, and several presentations. Highlights include the following:

• We will hear from Jon Klein regarding the AAP Richmond Center, with great opportunities for collaboration and funding. The Center, supported by a major grant from the Flight Attendant Medical Research Institute (FAMRI), is dedicated to the elimination of children’s exposure to secondhand tobacco smoke (SHS).
• Tom Peterson will present the Helen DeVos Children's Hospital’s parental tobacco cessation program and discuss their smoke-free hospital campus.
• We will have a participatory point/counterpoint discussion about the proposed FDA Bill (mentioned above).
• As always, we will hear updates of member and guest activities, with time for informal discussion, problem solving and idea sharing.

We look forward to seeing you in Hawaii! If you cannot be there but would be interested in joining the listserv, please contact any of the current co-chairs: Sophie Balk (sbalk@montefiore.org), Tahniat Syed Ansari (tahniat.Syed@drexelmed.edu), or Susanne Tanski (susanne.tanski@hitchcock.org)

Spring 2008 newsletter Article

It is difficult to determine a comprehensive view of the health status of Native Hawaiians. This is due in part to the fact that many studies do not distinguish between the diverse ethnicities in Hawaii. Vague definitions of ethnicity (i.e., self-report, mixed ethnicity, etc.) and aggregated study populations (i.e., combining multiple ethnic groups into one category) further make the true health status of ethnic minorities in Hawaii difficult to ascertain. Generalizations of research findings are difficult due to small sample sizes or unavailable data.

This year’s Race in Medicine SIG session will be held on Saturday, May 3rd, 2008 from 2-4pm at the PAS Meeting in Honolulu, Hawaii. This year’s session is entitled “The Construct of Race/Ethnicity and Its Implications in the Health of Hawaiians” will focus on what does the construct of “race/ethnicity” mean in Hawaii and what are the unique implications on health status in Hawaii.

The panelists for the session are J. Keawe'aimoku Kaholokula, PhD from the Department of Native Hawaiian Health at John A. Burns School of Medicine at University of Hawaii and Sylvia Yeun, PhD from the Center on the Family at the University of Hawaii at Manoa

Please do join us for a lively discussion. We also plan to have a brief business meeting after the panel discussion to discuss ideas for future Race in Medicine SIG activities.

Please feel free to contact Race in Medicine SIG co-chairs Iris Mabry (imabry@ahrq.gov) and Suzette Oyeku (soyeku@montefiore.org) with your ideas and suggestions.

We look forward to a great session at the PAS meeting in Honolulu!

Race in Medicine SIG
Iris Mabry, MD, MPH and Suzette Oyeku, MD, MPH