Fellows’ Forum: Why Rheumatology Fellows Should Get Involved with Advocacy

Introduction

Interest in rheumatology continues to grow, with more than 240 new adult and pediatric fellows to begin their training in the coming academic year. Given the broad and diverse career opportunities, it is an ACR goal to help guide trainees in their career decisions and professional development.

Rheumatology fellowship often marks the transition from large residency programs to smaller, more intimate educational training experiences. The ACR aims to foster and strengthen the collegial network among trainees from different programs by granting scholarships to attend conferences, educational premeetings, and sponsoring networking events. Although critical, the benefits of these events may not reach all trainees equally due to different resources and time commitments. This may leave our home institutions as our primary source of information regarding fellowship-related issues.

The Fellows-in-Training (FIT) Subcommittee will now be contributing to the Fellows’ Forum column in The Rheumatologist to provide an alternative and diversified platform for fellows to share and receive information related to their education, career, research, work–life balance and advocacy. Because this is a column for fellows written by fellows, we highly encourage you to submit articles to highlight and discuss aspects of fellowship you would like to address nationally.

Given the recent changes to the healthcare landscape and inevitable return of the political agenda to this topic, we wanted to highlight the importance of advocacy and how fellows can both become and maintain involvement in their careers. We are happy to present our inaugural article, by Drs. Alexandra Perel-Winkler and Chris Mecoli.

Take Action Now

Have you ever found yourself …

Rubbing your eyes with exhaustion after a long afternoon of clinic, facing multiple sets of prior authorization forms? Wishing there were a more efficient way to manage your patients’ treatment?

Frustrated that your patient with scleroderma has used all of their physical therapy by April and can no longer afford to participate in OT/PT for the remainder of the year?

Questioning your aspiration of becoming a clinical investigator upon hearing the low pay line for NIH K- and R-series grants?

These scenarios are all too familiar to rheumatology fellows across the nation. Tackling these systematic challenges is more than individual trainees or physicians can achieve on their own, but not more than can be accomplished in concert with our colleagues. Improving practice workflow and patient access to care, and increasing research funding are just a few of the many issues that the ACR/ARHP advocates for on our behalf.