Dr. Kumar
In August 2023, the Pediatric Hospital Medicine (PHM) community celebrated 20 years of hosting the Pediatric Hospital Medicine Conference. The milestone was marked by highlighting the field’s past, present, and future through plenaries.
Drs. Mary Ottolini and Ken Roberts covered the past in their plenary. They discussed how the field of PHM has grown, highlighting key milestones along the way, like the creation of a section within the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP), the first PHM Conference, the inaugural PHM fellow, and the American Board of Pediatrics’ recognition of PHM as a pediatric subspecialty.
Rev. Krista Gregory and Dr. Kenya McNeal-Trice discussed the current PHM landscape in their plenaries. Rev. Gregory talked about restoring capacity as it relates to mental well-being and resiliency. She provided hospitalists with resources to improve their own resiliency. Dr. McNeal-Trice presented on health equity in PHM. She defined health equity and related principles, shared patient experiences, and ended with takeaways for hospitalists to address health equity in their practice.
SHM’s president, Dr. Kris Rehm, tackled the future of PHM in her presentation. She identified areas the PHM field is encountering currently and areas it will be required to address as it grows. Dr. Rehm shared leadership strengths that will allow hospitalists to address challenges we encounter in clinical care, organizational development and leadership, and advocacy. She ended her plenary acknowledging her excitement for the field of pediatric hospital medicine.
The PHM Conference was first hosted in 2003, by the APA (then the Ambulatory Pediatric Association, now the Academic Pediatric Association). The conference was designed for pediatricians caring for hospitalized children. In 2005, the APA was joined by SHM and the American Academy of Pediatrics’ Section on Hospital Medicine to develop a three-society planning committee. Each year, one society takes the lead in planning the conference with planning committee representation from all three societies.
Along with the insightful article on electronic health records and the inspiring story of hospitalists who’ve served in the military, this issue features recaps of PHM Conference sessions. And, while these sessions were geared toward pediatric hospital medicine, there are topics and lessons to be learned for all hospitalists, including modeling empathy in difficult situations, health equity, pitfalls to implementing a protocol, multicenter research and QI, and much more.
There are more session recaps online. You can find all our PHM 2023 coverage here.
Dr. Kumar is a pediatric hospitalist at Cleveland Clinic Children’s and assistant professor of pediatrics at Cleveland Clinic Lerner College of Medicine of Case Western Reserve University. Dr. Kumar is also The Hospitalist’s pediatrics editor and an executive committee member of the SHM’s Pediatrics Special Interest Group.