Patient Focus | The Society of Pediatric Cardiology Training Program Directors recently joined forces with the American College of Cardiology, the American Academy of Pediatrics and the American Heart Association to develop the new 2015 SPCTPD/ACC/AAP/AHA Training Guidelines for Pediatric Cardiology Fellowship Programs released this month. A total of 63 authors worked on the introduction and eight task force reports making up the guidelines, which are a revision of the 2005 Training Guidelines for Pediatric Cardiology Fellowship Programs.

The introduction explains the overall changes to the training guidelines, including how the guidelines now meet ACGME’s new criteria for training programs. In addition, the guidelines include a new task force chapter on pulmonary hypertension, advanced heart failure and transplantation—joining existing task force chapters on general pediatric cardiology, noninvasive imaging, cardiac catheterization, electrophysiology, critical care, adult congenital heart disease and research. All reports identify the core competencies required of all pediatric cardiology fellows to complete training. Advanced training recommendations for each section are also summarized.

Subspecialty societies that endorsed the task force reports include the Society of Pediatric Echocardiography for the noninvasive imaging report; Society for Cardiovascular Angiography and Interventions for the cardiac catheterization report; and the Pediatric Cardiac Intensive Care Society for the critical care report.

“The purpose of the new criteria is to make them more relevant and useful in this era of competency-based training and evaluation,” said Robert D. Ross, MD, lead author of the document. “The hope is that this document will also help to improve quality within practices by ensuring that graduating fellows have the skills and knowledge required for this complex subspecialty.”

Keywords: CardioSource WorldNews, ACC Publications

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