Research During Residency

Sir.—I applaud the comments of Stiehm1in his editorial in the December 1988 issue ofAJDCcalling for a greater emphasis on research in both medical school and pediatric residency training. However, Stiehm implied that no residency program currently has such a requirement and that only one is implementing it. At the Children's Memorial Hospital, Chicago, Ill, we require that each resident complete a research project as a criterion for fulfilling the requirements for residency training. This requirement was initially implemented in the mid-1970s and persists to this time. It has proved to be a most successful component of our training program, with which over 150 research projects have been performed, completed, and presented to the faculty at the end of the third year of residency training. Although not the goal of this requirement, nearly one third of these projects have been published in the medical literature. Approximately one