Current State of Affairs in Pain Training.

[Noyac]

In 2008 the ACGME ruled that each institution could only have one Pain Fellowship program. I'm curious as to the current state of affairs in pain management training. Would any anesthesia resident be interested in a fellowship directed by specialties like PM&R or neurology? Has the numbers of anesth residents going into pain declined since this ruling? Has the training suffered?

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[AdmiralChz]

I was not aware that other programs used to have multiple fellowships. I think almost all interested in pain would go for an anesthesiology-directed fellowship. We had a recent meeting about this though heading into the new interview season for fellowships. Speaking to our institutional experience with the fellowship, the interest (gauged by number of applicants) is quite high, roughly 5-7x the number of applicants as to our cardiac fellowship and 10x to our CCM. I seem to remember about 1/4 to 1/3 being applicants who were not anesthesiology trained, and those are typically not nearly as competitive as the anesthesiology applicants as judged by that division. I think we've had 1 or 2 non-anesthesiology fellows in our PM program in the past 4 years I've been here.

Interestingly, last year was the first in the past 10 where the number of applicants did not increase and ever-so-slightly decreased.

 

[mmag]

Doesn't UCLA still have two pain fellowships?
UCLA—WLA VA Pain Medicine Fellowship
Department of Anesthesiology - UCLA David Geffen School of Medicine: Pain Fellowship

 

[BobBarker]

Colorado's pain fellowship was in the pm&r department but they took two fellows. One gas, one pm&r and the tracks were slightly different.