From Private Practice to Academia: The Experience of a General Academic Pediatrician

After pediatric residency, the author worked in a rural community where he was able to immediately practice skills acquired during training such as intubations, bag-mask ventilation, IV placement, ear irrigation, foreign body removal from eyes and ears, abscess incision and drainage, intraosseous placement for rapid hydration of a severely dehydrated infant, EKG, X-ray readings, and ear-irrigations to cite but a few examples. Furthermore, the writer acquired other high-valued procedural skills such as neonatal male circumcision, frenotomy, ligation of supernumerary digits, and manual separation of labial adhesions. The author feels that he could only have acquired and maintained these skills by working in a busy rural pediatric practice. When the writer later became a faculty member, he was able to effectively train medical students and pediatric residents to acquire these same skills. Even though there is a paucity of research information on procedural skills acquisition among general pediatric residents, the writer proposes that the recruitment of full-time general academic pediatricians with real-world experience may be potentially beneficial for the training of medical students and pediatric residents.