PROGRAM DIRECTORS AND CERA: AN IMPORTANT RELATIONSHIP

How many acronyms do you know where one of the acronym letters stands for an acronym? An acronym within an acronym? We hope most family medicine program directors think of CERA right away. CERA stands for CAFM Educational Research Alliance; CAFM is the Council of Academic Family Medicine.

Program directors are critical to the ongoing success of CERA for 2 reasons. CERA facilitates about 5 surveys every year. Only the program director population is surveyed twice every year and receives more proposals than all the other surveys combined, which tells us that we hold the answers to a lot of important questions from the rest of the “family” of family medicine organizations.

CERA surveys contain questions that are submitted by a variety of family medicine researchers and educators. For example, the last CERA program director survey contained submissions from medical schools, community programs, program directors, residency faculty, social scientists, and pharmacists.

CERA understands that program directors have limited time; therefore, they accept only proposals that include a good hypothesis, are related to what program directors do, contain decent questions, and finally, will likely end up in a published paper. Additionally, the results are archived to help others answer their research questions.

For these reasons, responding to CERA surveys should rank as a high priority for program directors. This seems to be the case, as the PD response rate, at 38% for the first CERA survey of program directors, has increased to over 60%. This is great; but clerkship directors’ response rate is more than 90%!

Another reason program directors are critical to the ongoing success of CERA is relevance. As program directors, we know the relevant questions to ask in order to advance family medicine education. We are in the midst of tremendous changes in both our clinical and educational infrastructures, and there is very little evidence to support any of the educational changes. We as program directors need to do our part to ensure our residents are still learning how to provide high-quality care to patients in the face of changing environments. CERA surveys can be excellent tools along these lines.

Most program directors think of themselves as clinician-educators, and CERA gives us the means to ask questions in a rigorous way. Once a proposal is accepted, CERA provides institutional review board approval through the American Academy of Family Physicians (AAFP) as well as experienced mentors. This collegial support from the rest of our family medicine community through CERA is invaluable as program directors expand our scholarship into the realm of educational research. An added benefit of CERA involvement is that it also provides an excellent opportunity to help you and your faculty meet the review committee for family medicine’s faculty scholarly activity requirement.

The AFMRD benefits greatly from the active involvement of its members in various organizations and activities, including CERA. For the last 2 years, Dr Paul Crawford, program director at Nellis Family Medicine Residency in Las Vegas, Nevada, has served as the AFMRD liaison to CERA. Dr Wendy Barr, associate program director at the Greater Lawrence Family Health Center in Lawrence, Massachusetts, is the new liaison.

CERA covets proposals from program directors, yet a limited number of proposals are received from program directors because, for one reason, program directors find many questions in the CERA surveys lack relevance to their roles. This lack of relevance is also the reason the AFMRD is taking the initiative to assist program directors in developing CERA proposals.

Those of us who consider ourselves novices at educational research and survey design will appreciate that the AFMRD Board is partnering with several researchers familiar with the CERA process to offer program directors mentoring, feedback, and suggestions prior to submission to CERA. Interested AFMRD members will be connected with a mentor/reviewer by contacting Lynn Pickerel at afmrd{at}aafp.org.

CERA accepts program director proposals twice a year, but please do not wait until the deadline—plan now. Develop your research question and hypothesis and start on the path to getting relevant questions about residency education answered!

• © 2015 Annals of Family Medicine, Inc.