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Abstract Introduction Sleep medicine training in pulmonary and critical care (PCCM) fellowships varies widely. The lack of formal curriculum and local pilot data demonstrating limited mastery of sleep medicine concepts via typical clinical exposure prompted us to develop, implement, and evaluate a sleep disordered breathing curriculum for first year PCCM fellows. Methods This educational study utilizes a historical control pre-test post-test model. The intervention arm consists of first-year PCCM fellows (n = 7) who completed a 10-question evaluation prior to fellowship-level education. They participated in a novel curriculum and are completing the same test upon conclusion of the curriculum. The curriculum is based on five case vignettes covering obstructive sleep apnea, obesity hypoventilation and sleep disordered breathing in COPD, heart failure, and neuromuscular disease. The control arm is comprised of PCCM fellows (n = 6) who have not had exposure to the SDB curriculum. They completed the evaluation at the conclusion of first year and at the beginning of their third year of fellowship. The evaluation was developed by local and national pulmonary and sleep medicine educators with expertise in question-writing. Results Test scores amongst the control group remained low at the end of first year of fellowship, with a mean score of 6/10 (60% +/- 8.9) and have remained low at the beginning of their third year of fellowship with a mean score of 5/10 (50% +/- 11.5%). When asked using a 5 point Likert scale (1=totally uncomfortable, 5=totally comfortable), to assess their comfort with the diagnosis and management of obstructive sleep apnea, the overall average response of 3.08 +/- 0.63 suggests limited comfort with these concepts. In regards to the intervention group, the mean pre-test score prior to beginning the curriculum was 3.71/10, (37.1% +/- 26.3%). Post-curriculum testing and data collection is ongoing with the intervention group, but preliminarily suggests an improvement in comfort level. Conclusion We suspect that the intervention group will demonstrate improved knowledge and comfort in the management of SDB. These results would suggest that our curriculum offers an opportunity to increase the number of pulmonologists who are able to care for the growing population of patients with SDB. Support (if any)
Stone et al. (Sat,) studied this question.