ACGME Proposes Changes to Pain Medicine Programs

The Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education (ACGME) has opened a review and comment period proposing revisions to the requirements for pain fellowship programs. The proposed changes can be found on ACGME’s website.

The American Society of Anesthesiologists (ASA) sent a letter to ACGME with concerns regarding the proposal to remove the requirement of having only one accredited pain fellowship per institution. Allowing competing pain fellowships within the same institution will significantly compromise the cooperative multidisciplinary education of future pain fellows. This will also increase competition for patients (decreased training of the pain fellows) and institutional resources, thereby draining these fellowships of the resources needed to adequately run a fellowship training program and also compromise the quality of the training program

ASA supports pain medicine fellowships based in any of the qualified disciplines, including psychiatry, neurology, physical medicine and rehabilitation, and anesthesiology. The Society is also supportive of increasing the number of programs in the country to enable more pain medicine physicians trained to fully address the needs of patients as the nation continues to address the ongoing opioid abuse epidemic. However, the society cannot support the proposal to have more than one program per institution.

ASA Members are encouraged to submit comments to [email protected] by October 18, 2018.