Building a Boot Camp: Pediatric Residency Preparatory Course Design Workshop and Tool Kit

INTRODUCTION: Although many medical schools are adding residency preparatory courses or boot camps to their curricula, there is little published guidance for faculty tasked with designing them. We developed a workshop and accompanying boot camp course design tool kit to assist faculty in creating a pediatric boot camp course following the initial steps of Kern's framework for curriculum development. METHODS: Learners participated in a 2-hour workshop incorporating short didactics, guided independent reflection, and group discussions. Workshop facilitators guided faculty through the tool kit materials including a literature overview, a needs assessment worksheet, session prioritization and schedule planning worksheets, a module design worksheet, and implementation strategies. RESULTS: Twenty-seven attendees at a national meeting of undergraduate pediatric educators participated in the workshop. Feedback was solicited via an anonymous electronic survey (41% completion rate), which indicated that attendees’ self-assessed confidence significantly increased for each component of the tool kit. For the five tool kit components surveyed, average confidence increased 26% (range: 17.5%–37.1%) after completing the workshop. All respondents also indicated that the tool kit would be moderately helpful to very helpful as a stand-alone resource for independent faculty use, corresponding to a 3.57 out of 5 weighted average for this Likert-scale question. DISCUSSION: We developed a pediatric boot camp course design workshop and tool kit to assist faculty in developing pediatric boot camps. Initial implementation was through a workshop, but the resource could be used individually and also adapted for use by other specialties.