1 From the Department of Pediatrics, The Johns Hopkins Hospital, Baltimore
The study of development is the backbone of pediatric training. It was not until 1951, however, that the American Board of Pediatrics1 officially recommended expanding the curriculum of training to include information on well-child growth and development. Since then, numerous scales and testing tools for developmental assessment have allowed diagnosis and successful intervention into sundry abnormalities not well appreciated before.
Given this history, it is not surprising that another area of development, in many ways akin to pediatrics, has been thus far overlooked. As new physicians embarking on residency training nationwide, our similarity to children can be appreciated with the acknowledgment of the multitude of milestones to be mastered on many levels during the training process. Timely acquisition of these milestones is of utmost importance to a house officer's survival, and adequate feedback regarding one's progress is often lacking. Thus, we sought a method for assessment and feedback for the house officer and elected to apply to this task the developmental testing used in the evaluation of our patients. We present here a scheme for the developmental assessment of the pediatric house officer with the following goals: first, that the milestones to be achieved during training be better appreciated and, second, that this initial report may stimulate more in-depth research into this area at other institutions of training.
MATERIALS AND METHODS
The population used for this preliminary prospective study was the pediatric house staff at the Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore. The time of study was July 1985 to June 1986.
Submitted on March 24, 1986