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About the LEAP Fellowship
Local Implementation of the LEAP Program
• Mentorship: The LEAP program includes intensive mentoring as a core component of the fellowship experience. Fellows of the national LEAP program have three mentors during their fellowship year: a local mentor from their academic program, a health department mentor and a national mentor drawn from the LEAP Steering Committee. Fellows are expected to have sessions with their mentors at least monthly throughout the fellowship year.
○ Purpose – There is no standardized career development pathway to successfully straddling building a career in academic and clinical medicine working alongside public health. On interviews with senior ID physicians who have made successful hybrid careers, one of the common factors to success was excellent and diverse mentors who assisted them with career guidance, networking and opportunity identification. The incorporation of three different mentors in the LEAP fellowship is intended to replicate this, providing career guidance from multiple perspectives, as well as assisting the fellow in networking and identifying potential career opportunities. Mentoring sessions also serve to monitor the progress of a LEAP fellow, help them troubleshoot issues and serve as a mechanism for identifying issues in need of escalation to program leadership.
○ Local academic mentor – LEAP applicants are required to identify a geographically local mentor at their academic institution at the time of application. Ideally, these should be existing longer term career mentors. There are no current requirements or expectations of the local mentor; their role is primarily to monitor and attempt to address local academic/clinical/non-work issues (such as issues around protected time, unexpected leave etc.) and to raise larger issues to the LEAP program leadership. The inclusion of a local mentor as a component of the LEAP application was partly to encourage all parties interested in LEAP to arrange mentorship relationships regardless of whether they were selected for the fellowship or not.
○ Health department mentor – A mentor and/or senior contact at the health department is crucial to a successful LEAP fellowship year. These mentors guide the fellow through the procedural and logistical hurdles needed to work inside the health department, as well as open doors to many of the experiential curriculum activities within the health department. Identification and a letter of support from this mentor is a component of the LEAP application process. Typically, most LEAP fellows have had hospital-associated infections and antimicrobial resistance coordinators or epidemiologists as their health department mentors.
○ LEAP national mentor – This mentor is not pre-selected by the applicant. This is a remote mentor provided to LEAP fellows by the LEAP program leadership during the fellowship year. They are selected from among the LEAP Steering Committee and the infectious diseases professional society networks as senior ID physicians that best match the stated career interests of the fellow and who ideally also have a large professional network. The purpose of the LEAP national mentor is to provide advice drawn from lived experience in the area that aligns with the fellow’s career trajectory, provide contacts and open career doors for the fellow to accelerate their career advancement, and also monitor the fellow’s progress during the fellowship year. LEAP national mentors have frequently met in person with their fellows during national conferences (e.g., IDWeek or the SHEA spring meeting).
○ Mentoring session guide – While mentors and fellows are not required to conform to a specific mentoring session process, a guide was created and distributed to mentors to provide a framework for these sessions should one be desired. This guide identifies key topics that should be reviewed at each session. These documents are not required to be submitted to program leadership and are only recommended as a guide and for personal records by the mentor.
○ Implementation comment
■ A locally developed LEAP program can consider consolidating the roles of the local and LEAP national mentors, as the only reason those are separate for the national program is that national mentors and LEAP fellows are not necessarily in the same location.
■ One issue that has arisen in previous classes of LEAP fellowship is that the health department mentor has left that health department during the fellowship year, leaving the LEAP fellow without a good HD contact. As a result, the national LEAP program has recently begun requiring fellows and health departments to identify back-up mentors for applicants to minimize the risk of disruption during the LEAP fellowship.
• Supplementary didactics: The LEAP fellowship year also includes a monthly virtual teleconference where all the fellows are able to gather and directly converse. The national LEAP program splits these teleconferences between group sharing/learning sessions and specialist lectures.
○ Purpose – While experiential exposure to topics is ideal, fundamentally it is not possible for every LEAP fellow to have the full breadth of experiences. Some activities, such as outbreak investigation, rely on occurrences that may not happen during their fellowship year. Others, such as leadership and national communications skills expertise, may be very specialized skills that aren’t necessarily easy to access at the local institutional level. As a result, the LEAP program has integrated teleconferencing meetings to allow fellows to share their experiences with unique activities, as well as allow leaders of the field of infectious diseases to meet and share their unique knowledge or perspective with the fellows.
○ Group learning/sharing sessions – Every other month, the teleconferencing session is made up of each fellow providing a brief 15- to 30-minute presentation on a unique or novel activity or teaching point that they encountered. This can be drawn from any of their recent experiences but is often from their experiential curriculum activities and projects. These sessions are also used for fellows to directly share with LEAP program leadership any shared issues or concerns that they have, as well as for them to share ideas with one another.
○ Specialist lectures – Alternating with the group learning sessions are specialist lectures. These lectures are aimed at providing fellows with exposure to the advice and expertise of field leaders, and information that they may not have consistent access to at any individual performance location. Examples include meeting with senior ID leaders that are world-renowned for having hybrid careers in ID and public health, meeting with CDC leadership to discuss current public health funding and employment opportunities for ID physicians and lectures on how to grow to become a medical leader as an ID physician. Clips from these types of lectures can be seen below.