Educational Perspectives: Boot Camps for Neonatal-Perinatal Medicine Fellows

Abstract

Fellowship training is a required component of the transformation of a pediatrician into an independent practitioner of neonatal-perinatal medicine (NPM). Exposure to neonatal intensive care, experience in the management of neonatal patients, and successful performance of neonatal procedures is lower in trainees entering NPM fellowship today as compared with the past. To address this change in the baseline competency of incoming fellows, many NPM fellowship programs have begun to conduct intensive, simulation-based training sessions at the beginning of fellowship, commonly called “boot camps.” In this article, we explore the concept of boot camps, examine curriculum design elements of boot camps for NPM fellows, provide examples of collaborative and regional NPM boot camps, explore challenges to conducting a boot camp for NPM fellows, and discuss future directions for NPM fellowship boot camps, on a national and international level.