Meeting the Growing Demands on Healthcare Providers: A Partnership Between an American College of Surgeons’ Fellowship and Health Professions Education Graduate Programs

The United States faces a critical shortage of physicians, and the demands on surgical educators are intensifying. The rise of educational initiatives like Graduate Health Professions Education (HPE) and the American College of Surgeons Accredited Education Institutes and the Education and Simulation (ACS-AEI ES) fellowship programs are examples of academia helping to meet this need. At Walter Reed National Military Medical Center, these 2 initiatives intersect. Fellows in the ACS-AEI ES program simultaneously pursue graduate education in HPE at the Uniformed Services University. The synergistic benefits, which we categorize as impacting the individual, the 2 programs, and the healthcare system as a whole, outweigh the sum of their parts. We suggest that overlapping educational programs can offer an efficient way to prepare surgeon-educators for excellence in complex, challenging healthcare systems. Partnerships like this can offer a blueprint to other institutions to maximize responsiveness and effectiveness in the face of growing challenges.