Scholarship Criteria for Promotion in the Age of Diverse Faculty Roles and Digital Media.

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVES: In academic medical centers, scholarship is essential to advancing scientific knowledge, clinical care, and teaching and is a requirement for faculty promotion. Traditional evidence of scholarship, such as publications in peer-reviewed academic journals, remains applicable to the promotions of physician and nonphysician researchers. Often, however, the same evidence does not fit the scholarly work and output of clinician-educators, whose scholarship is often disseminated through digital communications and social media. This difference challenges promotion and tenure committees to evaluate the scholarship of all faculty fairly and consistently. This study aimed to generate a list of the features that a faculty product should demonstrate to be considered scholarship, regardless of how it is disseminated. METHODS: The full professors of one academic department of family medicine engaged in a mini-Delphi deliberative process to identify criteria to assess whether a scholarly product put forth by faculty in the promotion process is indeed scholarship. RESULTS: The full professors identified seven criteria to evaluate a faculty product to assess whether it represents scholarship-specifically its demonstration of faculty expertise, faculty contribution, originality, peer review, quality, relative permanence, and impact. CONCLUSIONS: These criteria may help promotion committees more easily and consistently assess the full scope of a faculty member's scholarly work within today's changing approaches to its dissemination.

Evaluating the Child With a Limp.

A limp is a deviation from normal gait pattern, with pain as the presenting feature in about 80% of cases. The differential diagnosis is broad and includes congenital/developmental, infectious, inflammatory, traumatic (including nonaccidental), and, less commonly, neoplastic etiologies. Transient synovitis of the hip is the cause of a limp in the absence of trauma in 80% to 85% of children. It can be differentiated from septic arthritis of the hip by the absence of fever or ill-appearance and with laboratory testing that shows normal or only mildly elevated inflammatory markers and white blood cell count. If septic arthritis is suspected, joint aspiration should be performed urgently with ultrasound guidance and the aspirated fluid sent for Gram staining, culture, and cell count. Patient history, such as breech presentation at birth, and a leg-length discrepancy on physical examination may suggest developmental dysplasia of the hip. Pain reported primarily at night can occur with neoplasms. Hip pain in an adolescent who is overweight or has obesity may suggest slipped capital femoral epiphysis. Knee pain in an active adolescent may suggest Osgood-Schlatter disease. Radiography shows the degenerative femoral head changes in Legg-Calvé-Perthes disease. Abnormalities in bone marrow shown on magnetic resonance imaging indicate septic arthritis. A complete blood count with differential, erythrocyte sedimentation rate, and C-reactive protein should be obtained if infection or malignancy is suspected.

Diagnosis and Management of Common Types of Supraventricular Tachycardia.

Supraventricular tachycardia refers to rapid rhythms that originate and are sustained in atrial or atrioventricular node tissue above the bundle of His. The condition is caused by reentry phenomena or automaticity at or above the atrioventricular node, and includes atrioventricular nodal reentrant tachycardia, atrioventricular reciprocating tachycardia, and atrial tachycardia. Most persons with these tachyarrhythmias have structurally normal hearts. Sudden onset of an accelerated heart rate can cause palpitations, light-headedness, chest discomfort, anxiety, dyspnea, or fatigue. The history is important to elicit episodic symptoms because physical examination and electrocardiography findings may be normal. A Holter monitor or event recorder may be needed to confirm the diagnosis. Vagal maneuvers may terminate the arrhythmia; if this fails, adenosine is effective in the acute setting. Calcium channel blockers (diltiazem or verapamil) or beta blockers (metoprolol) can be used acutely or as long-term therapy. Class Ic antiarrhythmics (flecainide or propafenone) can be used long-term. Class Ia antiarrhythmics (quinidine, procainamide, or disopyramide) are used less often because of their modest effectiveness and adverse effects. Class III antiarrhythmics (amiodarone, sotalol, or dofetilide) are effective, but have potential adverse effects and should be administered in consultation with a cardiologist. Catheter ablation has a success rate of 95% and recurrence rate of less than 5%, and causes inadvertent heart block in less than 1% of patients. It is the preferred treatment for symptomatic patients with Wolff-Parkinson-White syndrome.

The importance of physician presence in nursing homes for residents with dementia and pneumonia.

OBJECTIVE: To study whether physician presence in the nursing home is related to clinical decision making, certainty, and honoring care preferences for patients with dementia and pneumonia. DESIGN: Cross-sectional survey of physicians. SETTING: Nursing homes in the United States and the Netherlands. PARTICIPANTS: Twenty-four US and 38 Dutch physicians who provide care for nursing home patients. MEASUREMENTS: Physicians reported their presence in the nursing home, diagnostic and treatment decisions for patients with dementia who had pneumonia, certainty about the diagnosis and patient and family preferences, and the extent to which they honored these preferences. These variables were examined in reference to physician presence in the nursing home. RESULTS: Physicians with higher nursing home presence were less likely to order a chest x-ray and to hospitalize patients with dementia and pneumonia, although this difference was not significant when adjusted for country. They also were more likely to be certain of family preferences, a difference that held even when adjusted for the strong confounder of country. CONCLUSION: Physician presence in the nursing home relates to some treatment decisions for patients with dementia and pneumonia. Policies that affect physician presence may change health care practices and related costs. Future studies should more closely examine how physicians use their time so as to better understand the importance of presence and what the US health care system might learn from the Dutch system.

Prognosis is important in decisionmaking in Dutch nursing home patients with dementia and pneumonia.

OBJECTIVE: To explore how physicians treating nursing home residents with dementia and pneumonia in the Netherlands consider prognosis in their treatment decision. METHODS: Survey study with data collected between July 2006 and March 2008. Physicians (n = 69) from 54 nursing homes in the Netherlands completed a questionnaire on symptoms, treatment, and prognosis for their next dementia patient newly diagnosed with pneumonia. They were also asked a general question regarding withholding antibiotic treatment and prognosis. Outcome was assessed at least two months afterwards. Two-week mortality risk if treated with antibiotics was calculated with a validated prognostic score. RESULTS: The patients not treated with antibiotics had high (92%) actual 2-week mortality while only 12% of patients treated with antibiotics died. Physicians believed that mortality risk was high in the untreated group and would have been only slightly lower if treated with antibiotics (mean estimated risk 73%), which was higher than predicted from the risk score (42%). In general, three-quarters of physicians considered withholding antibiotics appropriate for mortality risks between 75% and 90%. CONCLUSIONS: Prognosis is an important consideration when Dutch nursing home physicians make antibiotic treatment decisions for patients with dementia and pneumonia. This suggests they prefer not to treat with antibiotics when to do so is probably futile. Physicians in other countries may hold different views on futility, which should be addressed in larger, cross-national comparative studies.

Caring for older patients: current attitudes and future plans of family medicine residents.

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVES: As the US population ages, more physicians will be needed to provide care for older patients. We characterized family medicine residents' plans to include care of the elderly and to patients in nursing homes in their future practices. We also assessed whether residents' plans were related to their attitudes toward the elderly and the professional and financial satisfaction they foresaw in providing care to the elderly. We further examined the obstacles and incentives they perceived for providing nursing home care. METHODS: A written survey of residents in the seven residency programs of the Department of Family Medicine of the University of North Carolina. RESULTS: In total, 116 of the 139 residents responded (83.5%). Residents generally reported positive attitudes toward elderly patients. Nearly all residents (92.1%) planned to care for geriatric patients in their office, but only two thirds (68.1%) anticipated that older people will comprise a significant percentage of their practice. Interns were more interested in care for the elderly than were second- and third-year residents. Most residents did not anticipate that they will be professionally or financially satisfied with or enjoy nursing home care, and only 26.1% planned to provide care in nursing homes. Time constraints and financial concerns were often cited as obstacles to nursing home care. CONCLUSIONS: Family medicine residents have limited interest in nursing home care and may generally underestimate the influence of an aging society on their future practice. Meeting the health care needs of an aging society will require innovations in reimbursement, health care delivery systems, and residency curricula.

A cross-cultural study of physician treatment decisions for demented nursing home patients who develop pneumonia.

PURPOSE: We wanted to explore factors that influence Dutch and US physician treatment decisions when nursing home patients with dementia become acutely ill with pneumonia. METHODS: Using a qualitative semistructured interview study design, we collected data from 12 physicians in the Netherlands and 12 physicians in North Carolina who care for nursing home patients. Our main outcome measures were perceptions of influential factors that determine physician treatment decisions regarding care of demented patients who develop pneumonia. RESULTS: Several themes emerged from the study. First, physicians viewed their patient care roles differently. Dutch physicians assumed active, primary responsibility for treatment decisions, whereas US physicians were more passive and deferential to family preferences, even in cases when they considered families' wishes for care as inappropriate. These family wishes were a second theme. US physicians reported a perceived sense of threat from families as influencing the decision to treat more aggressively, whereas Dutch physicians revealed a predisposition to treat based on what they perceived was in the best interest of the patient. The third theme was the process of decision making whereby Dutch physicians based decisions on an intimate knowledge of the patient, and American physicians reported limited knowledge of their nursing home patients as a result of lack of contact time. CONCLUSION: Physician-perceived care roles regarding treatment decisions are influenced by contextual differences in physician training and health care delivery in the United States and the Netherlands. These results are relevant to the debate about optimal care for patients with poor quality of life who lack decision-making capacity.

The changing nature of women's sexual health concerns through the midlife years.

OBJECTIVE: Information about the sexual health care needs for midlife women is limited. This study compares and contrasts the nature and prevalence of sexual concerns for women as they progress through life and into menopause and the interest and experience these women have in discussing sexual concerns with their physicians. METHODS: Questionnaires were mailed to 2073 eligible women at military medical clinics in the early 1990s. Main outcome measures are self-reported sexual concerns and interest and experience in discussing these concerns with their physicians. RESULTS: Over 98% of women reported one or more sexual concerns. Type and intensity of sexual concerns changed as women aged. Most women had not had the topic of sexual health ever raised by their physicians. CONCLUSIONS: The sexual health concerns of women change as they age. Women desire to address their sexual health care needs with their physicians. Physicians should be aware of the common sexual concerns of women, and be comfortable in initiating discussion to address them.