(1098) Longitudinal Echocardiography Curriculum for Advanced Fellowship in Pediatric Cardiac Critical Care

Introduction: Competency in pediatric cardiac critical care (PCCC) requires familiarity with transthoracic echocardiography. As there is no unified training pathway for PCCC, learners completing advanced fellowship training in PCCC come from varied backgrounds, mostly pediatric critical care medicine (PCCM) fellowship. While some have echocardiography training from completing pediatric cardiology fellowship, exposure to echocardiographic methods and interpretation is limited in most PCCM fellowship programs. We aimed to develop a longitudinal curriculum to expose advanced fellowship trainees in PCCC to the use of echocardiography to define anatomy and physiology of congenital heart disease (CHD) and cardiomyopathy (CMPY), with emphasis on use for hemodynamic monitoring and assessment.

Methods: A 12-hour boot camp focused on using echocardiography to define CHD anatomy served as a foundational teaching session at the start of the advanced fellowship year. A longitudinal echocardiography curriculum was constructed to build on boot camp foundations, focusing on evaluating physiology and hemodynamic assessment in CHD and CMPY. Using an iterative group feedback process, faculty with dual board certification in pediatric cardiology and PCCM generated a list of relevant teaching topics for echocardiography in PCCC, organized topics into related categories, and created a series of 6 one-hour, case-based teaching sessions. Faculty dual-boarded in PCCM and pediatric cardiology taught the curriculum bi-monthly. Anonymous feedback was collected after each session via electronic survey with 5 point Likert scale and free response questions.

Results: Five learners completing advanced training in PCCC completed the introductory boot camp and longitudinal curriculum. Feedback was universally positive: sessions met stated objectives (100%), were relevant to their training (100%) and would recommend the curriculum to other trainees (100%). Free response comments highlighted that teaching was “high-yield” and “clinically relevant.”

Conclusions: Advanced fellowship trainees in PCCC benefit from a longitudinal curriculum on using echocardiography for cardiac anatomy and hemodynamic assessment in CHD and CMPY. A formal curriculum helps to supplement competency in this important modality, especially for non-cardiologist trainees.