S1261 Parental Leave Policies Are Inadequate, Inaccessible, and Undermined by Workplace Barriers: Preliminary Results From a Nationwide Survey of Trainees

Abstract

INTRODUCTION: There has been no comprehensive examination of parental leave policies for fellowship programs in adult or pediatric medicine. METHODS: We emailed a 40-question survey to trainees at 500 fellowship programs in cardiology, hematology/oncology, gastroenterology (GI), and pulmonology/critical care. The Research Electronic Data Capture (REDCap) platform hosted at Weill Cornell Medical College was used to collect survey data. Chi-square tests were used to compare proportions for categorical variables and t-tests to determine significance for numerical variables. All statistical analysis was done on R (Version 3.65). RESULTS: A total of 197 fellows have responded to the survey as of this writing. The mean age for trainees was 32.8 years and 32.7 years in adult and pediatric programs, respectively. Our cohort included 108 women (54.8%), 125 from adult medicine (63.5%), and 37 from GI (18.8%). The majority were married (81.6%) and had at least one child (54.8%), including during fellowship (60.2%). Most respondents (56.9%) denied knowing about parental leave policies outlined by supervisory bodies such as ACGME, including those who had children during fellowship. Average length of parental leave offered to childbearing (CB) trainees was longer than that offered to non-childbearing (NCB) trainees (5.3 weeks vs. 2.3 weeks, P < 0.01). Many trainees (74.6%) felt that parental leave should be longer, anywhere from 5 to 15 weeks long. The biggest barriers to parental leave support they cited were time constraints of training (39.1%), followed by workplace culture (19.8%). Our findings are summarized in Tables 1–3. Other concerns that arose in free-text answers included fellows’ taking salary cuts from parental leave or facing infertility challenges from delaying pregnancy. There were no statistically significant different responses between pediatric and adult programs. CONCLUSION: Trainees across multiple subspecialties face similar issues regarding the state of parental leave policies. They appear broadly uninformed about ACGME, ABIM, and ABP guidelines on parental leave, which can affect how much leave they expect or request. There is variability in leave duration taken by CB and NCB fellows, and the majority of both felt current length is inadequate. Parental leave policies are not uniform, adequate, or equitable across multiple disciplines. Closer coordination among supervisory organizations to standardize and implement equitable parental leave policies is needed.Table 1.: Cohort CharacteristicsTable 2.: Selected ResponsesTable 3.: Continuous Variables