TRAINING THE NEXT GENERATION: "Discovering Graduate Medical Education at NIH"

Episode #1
Uploaded: May 19, 2010
Running time: 05:34

HILL: From the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, MD: Hello and welcome to this episode in Training the Next Generation podcast series, which explores how we're cultivating clinical and translational researchers, who examine today's problems and find tomorrow's cures.

I'm Virginia Hill, and today I'm going to speak with Dr. Robert Lembo, who serves as the Executive Director of Graduate Medical Education at the NIH Clinical Center.

Dr. Lembo provides administrative oversight for the 18 training programs accredited by the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education, or the ACGME. Dr. Lembo is a graduate of Cornell University Medical College and completed his residency and fellowship training in Pediatrics at Yale New Haven Hospital.

Hello Dr. Lembo, thank you for joining us today.

LEMBO: Thank you.

HILL: So how would you describe the overarching goals or mission of graduate medical education at the NIH?

LEMBO: So, our goal is to train clinician scientists. We are focused on allowing individuals who have an interest in academic careers to gain clinical competency in their chosen medical or surgical specialty or subspecialty disciplines, and then we add value to their training by enabling them to develop competency either as clinical investigators or translational researchers.

HILL: And I bet there are a lot of people out there wondering what it's like to work at the NIH: How would you describe the culture of learning here?

LEMBO: In addition to a collaborative culture of learning, we have a culture that fosters excellence in patient care, as well as excellence in clinical research.

HILL: So let's take this a step further. If you could put yourself in the shoes of a prospective resident or fellow, why would you choose to train at the NIH?

LEMBO: I would choose to train at the NIH, were I to be interested in a long-term career in academic medicine as an independently funded investigator. The graduate medical education community at NIH is committed to maximizing the potential of clinical trainees to achieve success as academicians by providing the infrastructure and material resources to support research training as well as individual research projects, and most importantly in my view, through highly productive mentoring relationships with world class scientists.

HILL: What are some other factors that would influence your decision?

LEMBO: I would also consider training at the NIH because of the value added to clinical training offered within a specific subspecialty field. We do have some very unique and complex patients that often challenge existing biomedical dogma and the current thinking regarding diagnosis and treatment. These are the patients encountered on rounds and discussed in conferences every day at the NIH Clinical Center under the supervision of internationally renowned physician investigators.

And, in addition, as evidence of our commitment to supporting the next generation of clinician scientists, the NIH offers loan forgiveness to individuals with qualifying debt levels who are enrolled in our training programs, and that loan forgiveness can range from a low of $20,000 to as much as $35,000 per year.

HILL: And what do you think it takes to be successful here at the NIH?

LEMBO: I think it takes a high level of intellectual curiosity, as well as commitment to excellence in clinical care, and a vision for career development that focuses on utilizing talents that the individual trainee brings to the NIH for the purposes of developing skills as a clinical researcher.

HILL: Well, it's obvious that there are a lot of benefits to working here, but do you feel that there are any misperceptions about what it's like to work here, and if so, what are they?

LEMBO: Yes I do. I think the biggest misperception is that we do not have clinical training programs on our campus. Many individuals in the national graduate medical education training community are surprised to learn that we have ACGME accredited residencies and fellowships sponsored by the NIH Clinical Center. An additional misperception is that the training experience in a specialty or subspecialty is potentially limited because it occurs only on our campus and on patients with rare illnesses. That is not true; we have collaborative training agreements with many academic medical centers in the metropolitan DC area to permit our trainees to encounter the full spectrum of patients, common and not so common, in order to achieve clinical competency in their discipline of interest. And our training affiliations and collaborations extend beyond that to institutions such as Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore.

HILL: Thank you again for joining us Dr. Lembo and giving us some insight into the graduate medical education programs at the NIH. And thank you for listening to this episode of Training the Next Generation. For more information on opportunities offered by the Clinical Center's Office of Clinical Research Training and Medical Education, visit www.cc.nih.gov/training.

Until next time, we look forward to working with you to make tomorrow's cures a reality. I'm Virginia Hill from the Clinical Center at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, MD, an agency of the United States Department of Health and Human Services.