title: A journal club for peer mentorship: helping to navigate the transition to independent practice.
abstract: The transition from residency to independent practice presents unique challenges for physicians. New attending physicians often have unmet learning needs in non-clinical domains. An attending physician is an independent medical practitioner, sometimes referred to as a staff physician or consultant. Peer mentorship has been explored as an alternative to traditional mentorship to meet the learning needs of new attendings. In this article, the authors describe how a journal club for general internal medicine fellowship graduates helped ease the transition by facilitating peer mentorship. Journal club members were asked to bring two things to each meeting: a practice-changing journal article, and a 'transition to practice' discussion topic such as a diagnostic dilemma, billing question, or a teaching challenge. Discussions fell into three broad categories that the authors have termed: trading war stories, measuring up, and navigating uncharted waters. It is likely that physicians have a strong need for peer mentorship in the first few years after the transition from residency, and a journal club or similar discussion group may be one way to fulfil this.
authors.affiliation: Division of General Internal Medicine, University Health Network, Toronto, ON, Canada. tom.macmillan@uhn.ca.|Division of General Internal Medicine, Department of Medicine, University of Toronto, Toronto, ON, Canada. tom.macmillan@uhn.ca.
authors.forename: Thomas E
authors.initials: TE
authors.lastname: MacMillan
authors.affiliation: Division of General Internal Medicine, University Health Network, Toronto, ON, Canada.|Division of General Internal Medicine, Department of Medicine, University of Toronto, Toronto, ON, Canada.
authors.forename: Shail
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Rawal
authors.affiliation: Division of General Internal Medicine, University Health Network, Toronto, ON, Canada.|Division of General Internal Medicine, Department of Medicine, University of Toronto, Toronto, ON, Canada.|Sinai Health System, Toronto, ON, Canada.
authors.forename: Peter
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: Cram
authors.affiliation: Division of General Internal Medicine, University Health Network, Toronto, ON, Canada.|Division of General Internal Medicine, Department of Medicine, University of Toronto, Toronto, ON, Canada.
authors.forename: Jessica
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Liu
keywords: Continuing medical education; Journal club; Medical education; Mentorship; Residency; Transition to practice