New Requirements for the Clinical Year in Diagnostic Radiology
The past few months the RRC staff office at the ACGME has been receiving telephone calls from both program directors and residents who are concerned about meeting the new requirements that go into effect in July 2010. For the most part, the current radiology program requirements were updated to accommodate the changes in the American Board of Radiology’s (ABR) examination schedule. If you are interested, you can review the approved changes at the following link:
http://www.acgme.org/acWebsite/downloads/RRC_progReq/420_diagnostic_radiology_07012010_TCC.pdf
The changes are immediately noticeable because they are written in red. The "new" requirements appear in only 5 sections in the document and most of them were developed to address the ABR examination situation. However, the calls to ACGME are not requesting additional information about those requirements.
Questions are related to the clinical year that takes place before residents enter their radiology residency programs. Program directors are concerned that the residents who are currently PGY-1’s will not have fulfilled the clinical year elective radiology rotation requirements by the time their radiology training commences in July 2010. Residents are concerned that their PGY-1 program cannot offer them an elective radiology rotation that takes place in an ACGME-accredited program; so, they will not be accepted into a radiology program.
The RRC leadership is aware of this situation and has developed a time-limited procedure to address it. The procedure should accommodate those residents who cannot meet the requirement this academic year and ease the transition for program directors who plan to accept these residents.
Please read the following memo to learn more about how the RRC is approaching this situation.
The Residency Review Committee (RRC) for Diagnostic Radiology is pleased that program directors are carefully reading the edited program requirements that go into effect July 1, 2010. In response to some recent questions, the RRC is recommending that radiology program directors give special consideration to this new section of the requirements:
"During the clinical year, elective rotations in diagnostic radiology must occur only in radiology departments with an ACGME accredited diagnostic radiology residency program and cannot exceed two months."
This requirement may be challenging to enforce for the PGY-1’s who recently started their clinical year. Consequently, the RRC is advising that program directors do their best to ensure that clinical-year programs meet this requirement although it may not be possible this academic year. However, residents who enter radiology training programs in July 2011 are required to have met this requirement during their clinical year. Radiology program directors who accept residents from clinical-year programs that did not meet this requirement can be cited for non-compliance at the time of their next program review.
