Assessment of Fellowship Didactic Curricula in Hematology/Oncology: Cross-Sectional Findings From the PODCAST-HOF...

Didactic lectures play an important role in hematology/oncology fellowship education. How each program structures their curricula is determined independently. To improve the trainee experience, identifying best practices is essential, but limited data about program structure exist. This marks the first cross-sectional analysis of hematology/oncology fellowship didactic curricula from a heterogenous group of programs to-date. Twenty-eight US Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education-accredited hematology/oncology fellowship programs were included. Local principal investigators completed a 21-question survey containing a series of multiple-choice and open-ended questions to understand participating programs’ educational curricula and structure. Responses were analyzed using descriptive statistics for multiple-choice questions and thematic analysis for open-ended questions. All participating programs completed the background assessment (100% response rate), representing a heterogenous group of academic and community programs across the continental US. There was a median of 3 days of lectures (range 1–5 days per week), with slideshow presentations as the primary mode of content delivery (100%). Disease-specific faculty delivered the majority of content for malignant hematology and oncology (n = 26, 93%) and classical hematology (n = 18, 64%) at most programs. Journal club was included in 24 programs (86%), however only four programs invited biostatisticians (17%) and only 8 programs (28%) included introductory biostatistics lectures. The majority of programs also encouraged supplemental resource use. These data suggest that there remains heterogeneity with regards to the structure of didactic curricula in hematology/oncology fellowship programs. Future efforts to evaluate how these variations impact fellow education should be undertaken to identify best practices.