ASCEND

ASCEND Program for Early Career Faculty

Advancing Scholarship, Clinical Excellence, Education, and Innovation Development

The ASCEND program is a three-year certificate program designed to provide early career faculty with a structured yet flexible path for professional growth. The program includes workshops, peer feedback, and hands-on projects with an emphasis on clinical excellence, teaching, scholarship and leadership.

Program Structure:

  1. Year 1: Building Core Skills
    • Clinical Skills
      1. Peer observation and feedback
      2. POCUS
      3. Addiction Medicine
      4. Expected Practice for most frequently seen conditions
      5. Patient communication
      6. Application of problem representation and illness scripts
      7. Site visits to key settings (jail health, LHH, SRO, Jewish Home)
    • Clinical Teaching
      1. Bedside teaching, feedback techniques, and adult learning principles.
    • Evidence-Based Practice:
      1. Introduction to Bayesian decision-making
      2. Introduction to critical appraisal of the literature
    • Quality Improvement, Patient Safety, Health Systems
      1. Complete A3 thinking workshop
      2. Join a division, department, or hospital-level committee
    • Career Mentorship
      1. Setting career goals, finding mentors, and exploring academic pathways.
    • Capstone Project
      1. Start brainstorming ideas and identifying partners/collaborators
         
  2. Year 2: Application and Growth
    • Advanced Clinical and Teaching Skills: Coaching, advanced POCUS techniques, and learner assessment.
    • QI and Scholarly Engagement: Designing small-scale QI projects and initiating scholarly work.
    • Career Mentorship: Continued guidance on professional goals and promotion readiness.
       
  3. Year 3: Advanced Topics and Leadership
    • Leadership in Academic Medicine
       
  4. Capstone Project: Initiate, develop and complete a QI initiative, educational project, or scholarly manuscript aligned with Division priority areas