Congratulations New Fellows

Congratulations to the incoming class of Nephrology fellows!

I’m one of you! I went to way too many interviews and had the pleasure of meeting several passionate nephrologists and fellows. I’m confident that there are a lot of amazing, talented physicians among us.

While we may not meet each other again until our 2nd year of fellowship, I was hoping we could plan to build a stronger social network to stay abreast of the year ahead of us and affect change.

As a start, I wanted to point out a few resources available for us to use once we’re fellows in July of 2018: 1. Societies: Sign up to ASN, NKF and ISN. It’s free for fellows and gives you access to journals [Like JASN and CJASN through ASN; KI through ISN], NephSAP and grants for travel and research. ASN allows you to sign up for free as a resident, so, you could start there for now. 2. Travel Grants: Once you enter your second year, you’ll be able to go to several conferences. Here’s a running list of courses and conferences, several of which offer travel grants for fellows. [P.S: If you’re a medical student/resident, ASN and NKF have travel grants for conferences for you too!] 3. Grants. As your research interests develop, feel free to look here for opportunities for funding. 4. Social media. Please join the Renal Fellow Network blog [this one right here!], twitter and the NSMC [Nephrology Social Media Collective]. While the NSMC has already enlisted their amazing group of interns, applications will be open again for the next year. For this year, NSMC was accepting applications till January 1st, 2018.

There are several challenges that I’m aware of facing us in nephrology today. I’m going to list a few in the hopes that you will find some of these areas to be worth your while to work on in the near future.

As I write this, health policy in the field of nephrology is changing. For instance, a bill was introduced in October, 2017, which, on the surface appears to provide integrated care for dialysis patients. However, I have some concerns related to the bill pertaining to its ability to limit small and medium sized dialysis organizations from functioning, in addition to further severing the transitions of care between CKD and dialysis for patients. We need more physicians discussing bills like this in private and in public to help advocate for the future of our profession as well as our patients. As a group, we can make a difference.

The reputation of nephrology among medical students and residents has also changed over the last few years. Currently, I do not believe there are consistent websites or resources for interested applicants to look at to make an informed decision on nephrology. While there are a lot of negative things that are being said about our field, you are all here for a reason. I hope that we can use this blog to reinforce our reasons and convince future applicants to make the right choice for their career, whatever it may be.

One of the easiest and productive ways for us to make a difference in health policy, education, recruitment, clinical research and our career as nephrologists is to improve our collective social presence. This is why I think it’s important for you to consider joining this blog or the NSMC, if you haven’t already. [links above]

The Renal Fellow Network blog was created to be by the fellows and for the fellows. I hope you will join me in keeping that promise. Posted by Yuvaram Reddy