Faculty Development Funding Feature: Katie Sampene, MD
Each fiscal year, the Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology Faculty Development Committee makes available a total of $10,000 for professional development. Faculty may submit applications at any time (until funds are exhausted for the current fiscal year).
Read more about Dr. Katie Sampene’s experience with the Faculty Development Funding Program, and learn how you can apply for faculty development funds here!
Why were you interested in the One Key Question® Certification and Preconception and Contraception Pathways to Care training?
We were working on a project via the DEI committee: our aim was to optimize our contraceptive counseling during pregnancy in the peripartum period. As part of the background for better understanding some of the concerns from the community, we had reviewed the Saving Our Babies report, which contained a recommendation for providers to consider that training. While it's not specific to pregnancy or the postpartum period, there are some foundational concepts as part of that training that we wanted to be sure to incorporate as we thought about how to optimize our care.
What was the approximate time commitment to complete your training?
Half a day or a little bit less than half a day.
How have you been able to apply what you learned in the training to your clinical activities?
It's been it was really informative, actually. There are things that, even though I saw them a lot I didn't really conceptualize them until I took that training. For example, one thing that I learned is that people's stated objectives for pregnancy or birth control may not always match to their choice, and while I saw that, in practice, I always thought that that was something that I should be trying to correct. So, for example, if someone said they weren't planning to be pregnant, but wanted to use just condoms, I sort of perceived it as my job to try to help them make a different choice. Through the training I realized that sometimes it's okay for people to have that difference and it probably relates to the way some of us just function and behave.
Another thing that I also realized from that training is that it's okay not to be sure if you want to be pregnant or not. I think many of us are pretty black and white in our field from that standpoint, and we're just thinking well, you either know that you want to be pregnant, or you don't want to be pregnant. And just kind of recognizing that many patients are just unsure of their wishes and the choice to contracept or not may reflect that uncertainty, and that it's not necessarily my job to get them to be sure about their pregnancy wishes, but rather just to make sure that whatever choices they make regarding contraception or the lack of it is reflecting an informed choice and is reflecting what their wishes are.
Do you feel like skills and information you learned in the training benefit health care providers or trainees in the broader department?
From the standpoint of education, we're hoping to disseminate these concepts through our work in the DEI committee. One Key Question has a worksheet that could be used in the clinical space to better understand the patient's perspective, what's important to them and what their wishes are. One of the things that we've been working on through the DEI committee is determining a form of that that would be applicable during pregnancy. We’ll probably need to make some alterations so that it makes sense for the pregnancy time interval, but I’m hoping that using those concepts and potentially a similar worksheet to what they developed can help us disseminate the concepts with our resident learners and our student learners as we roll out that project.
Would you recommend the Faculty Development Grant to others in the department?
Yes, definitely! It was really easy to navigate and the administrative staff was really helpful in getting me connected with the application process. It was smooth and straightforward, and I was really appreciative that it was able to do that without having to make a choice between a different thing that I usually do with my CME money.