The Impact of Updated ACGME Program Requirements for Radiation Oncology Residencies

Abstract

In 2022, the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education (ACGME) made several changes to the common program requirements for radiation oncology, which may be difficult for some residency programs to meet in their present state. Programs are currently expected to have 1.5 clinical physician faculty members per resident. Additionally, the sponsoring institution must sponsor at least one medical oncology program and sponsor or have affiliations with ACGME-accredited surgical oncology and pathology programs. We sought to investigate if radiation oncology programs would presently be able to meet these requirements. We compiled a list of accredited radiation oncology residency programs from the ACGME website and then visited each program's webpage to count the number of radiation oncology residents and clinical physician faculty to calculate the corresponding ratio. We included clinical faculty from the main campus and selected satellite and affiliate sites if residents definitely or probably rotated there. We also searched the websites of each sponsoring institution for sponsored pathology, medical oncology, and surgical oncology programs. We identified 90 ACGME-accredited radiation oncology residency programs. At least 9 programs appear to currently have a ratio of clinical physician faculty to residents of less than 1.5:1, ranging between 0.85 and 1.38. In addition, 1 sponsoring institution does not have its own hematology and medical oncology or medical oncology program, 61 do not have a surgical oncology fellowship, and 5 do not have a pathology residency; however, this does not include affiliated programs. Approximately 10% of radiation oncology residency programs seem to have insufficient clinical faculty to accommodate their residents per the new ACGME requirements. Furthermore, almost 70% of sponsoring institutions do not sponsor a medical oncology, pathology, or surgical oncology program, though this does not include potentially affiliated programs. A primary limitation of our study is that we collected information from publicly available information, which may be inaccurate. Nevertheless, based on our findings, the new requirements may likely impose challenges on several programs, and failing to meet the requirements can risk program accreditation.