S A E M
Newsletter of the Society for Academic Emergency Medicine January/February 2008 Volume XXIII, Number 1
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2008 SAEM Annual Meeting Update
President’s Message Academic Integrity
Craig Newgard, MD Oregon Health and Science University SAEM Program Chair The 2008 SAEM Annual Meeting will be held May 29 through June 1, 2008 at the Marriott Wardman Park Hotel in Washington, DC. The Program Committee has been busy planning an outstanding meeting. The meeting registration form and rooms at the Wardman Park are now available on-line at http://www.saem.org. If you are a speaker at the meeting, there is a separate registration form schedule also available on-line.
Baseball is my favorite sport. My approach to academics and research is a lot like the Field of Dreams. I have always believed that if you build it, they will come. The system I built begins with the Academic Associate Program. The Academic Associates are undergraduate premedical students, who take a formal university course in clinical Judd E. Hollander, MD emergency medicine research. They work in the ED learning how to enroll patients in clinical studies, along with a didactic lecture series in clinical research, good clinical practices and research ethics. Until the end of 2007, this program was smooth sailing. I only had two complex ethical issues to wrestle with over the past 15 years. In the mid 1990’s, a student asked me to write a letter of recommendation. LL had failed both tests, repeated the class, and failed one of the two tests again (it was the same test — he got a 20% the second time). After a lot of soul searching, I wrote LL’s letter. It said he was nice guy, was late for 5 of 20 mandatory shifts, failed two tests the first time and one of two the second time. It seems to me that a student should be able to find 3 people to write letters. But, if I was one of the 3 he thought would write the best letter, I felt I had a responsibility to make sure that patients would be safe (i.e., maybe LL should do something else with his life). I now tell the class the first day that if they ask for a letter, I will write one. It will be 100% honest. I no longer consider this a difficult decision. I am honest with the students from day one. For those of you who know me, no one has ever accused me of being hard to read or hiding what I think about them.
There were 108 didactic proposals submitted for the meeting in September, 36 of which were accepted. Both the total number of submissions and acceptances were higher than ever before. Sessions will include a pre-day (Wednesday, May 28) grant-writing workshop to be held at the National Institutes of Health, five State-of-the-Art sessions (including “Bringing Back the Dead”), several pediatric sessions, education didactics, the impact of ED overcrowding on patient outcomes, and more. A preliminary schedule and listing of the didactic sessions is available on the SAEM website. Deadline for abstracts is January 8, 2008. Abstracts will be rigorously reviewed by more than 100 reviewers using a standardized grading tool. All submissions will then be re-reviewed by a small group on the Program Committee, with accepted abstracts grouped into themed categories for presentation. Persons submitting abstracts should receive notification of the final status of the abstract by the end of February 2008. Due to the large number of anticipated submissions (greater than 1,200) and very short timeline for scoring and coordinating submitted abstracts, there is not an option for appealing abstract decisions. Approximately 50% of submitted abstracts will be accepted for the meeting. Additional deadlines include submissions for Innovations in Emergency Medicine Exhibits (due February 1, 2008) and photo submissions (February 15, 2008); both IEME and photos can be submitted on-line through the SAEM website.
In just the last month, I have had to wrestle with students being accused of academic dishonesty. TB was accused of falsifying data. The study was assessing interrater reliability of the resident and student medical history taking. When the history is discordant, there is a tie breaker student who is supposed to clarify the correct answer with the patient. TB, as the tie breaker, allegedly asked the first student whether she thought the history was correct. She proceeded to check off a box as she mumbled, “I’ll just go with you, on that one.” When I learned
Several special events are planned for the 2008 meeting. There will be a town hall-type keynote address on the first day, with the opening reception to follow. On day two (Friday, May 30), SAEM will host a networking (Continued on page 6)
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“to improve patient care by advancing research and education in emergency medicine”