Eligibility
We invite medical or osteopathic students and trainees in US-based programs that are LCME- or COCA-accredited (for undergraduate schools) or ACGME- or AOA-accredited (for graduate training) to apply to work as AMA Journal of Ethics Fellows to generate monthly theme issues.
Medical or osteopathic students, resident physicians, and fellows may submit an application by themselves or with one other person, who could be a US-based student or trainee in a health professions, graduate, or professional degree program relevant to health care ethics and policy.
Applications are accepted 2 times per year, due on 15 March and 15 September of each year.
Duties
To apply, please do the following:
- Propose a title that describes a theme and characterizes a set of ethical issues to explore in an issue of the AMA Journal of Ethics. Please explain why this theme is interesting, important, complex, or neglected in the peer-reviewed bioethics literature.
- Identify a faculty mentor who agrees to help you (and your co-applicant) build a theme issue with the journal. Briefly address your plan to work closely with AMA Journal of Ethics editorial staff to generate ideas, solicit contributors, and synthesize the theme issue according to content development and production deadlines.
- Briefly describe how your theme issue will explore the following:
- 3 case narratives with questions to which an expert will respond in a commentary
- 1 policy question
- 1 social, cultural, anthropological question
- 1 history question
- 1 state of the art science question
- 1 health professions education question
Descriptions of more AMA Journal of Ethics manuscript types can be found in the instructions for authors.) Typically, each theme issue will contain eight manuscripts by experts you solicit. Solicited manuscripts will be peer-reviewed. Unsolicited manuscripts submitted in response to a Call for Papers for your theme issue will also be considered for peer-review.
- Describe how you will help secure visual assets for and publicize your theme issue. Fellows work closely with the journal’s editorial staff and marketing specialist during all content development and production phases.
- Depending upon when you apply, if selected, you must attend the entire working conference, held at AMA Headquarters in Chicago on the first Monday and Tuesday in May and on the first Monday and Tuesday in November of each year. (Reasonable expenses for participation and travel are covered by the AMA Journal of Ethics.)
How to Apply?
Send a single PDF attachment, with your last name only as the file name to Mr. Kelly Shaw ([email protected]). This single PDF must contain a one-page curriculum vitae summary for each applicant or co-applicant that includes contact information and a proposal (750-word maximum, not including references) articulating responses to 1-5 above.
Please note that everything you want us to consider as part of an application must be in this PDF attachment, not in the text of an email message. Submissions must be received by 5pm central time, as marked by email time stamp when received by the AMA Journal of Ethics, on the due date. Applicants who have waited until 4:55, for example, to submit have occasionally been disappointed, due to transmission delays, so please plan accordingly. Applications not meeting content criteria, containing excess materials, or exceeding the word count maximum will not be reviewed.
Selection
Preference will be given to proposals on innovative, interesting, important issues of ethical complexity in health care and health policy and the importance of preparing current and future clinicians to address these issues.
We are particularly interested in exploring the following, though proposals need not be limited to these topics: What does it mean to prognosticate well?, Should health ‘care’ be relabeled as health ‘services’?, If good health systems performance is not achievable in an underregulated for-profit health sector, what should systemic reform look like?, agentic AI in health care, roles of clinicians in prosecuting carceral and police-custody violence, forensic autopsy privatization, allopathic clinical acupuncture training and practice, direct to consumer advertising, roles of health care in green space preservation, public sanitation as critical health care infrastructure, roles of health care in addressing the endemicity of violence in the US, how should excess death be defined, roles of clinicians in insurance claim payment rejection appeals and reviews, moving clinical trial subjects from war zones to preserve research agendas and protocols, personal responsibility in health, double standards in self-diagnostic expectations from both clinicians and patients, usefulness of cash transfer programs addressing structural determinants of health, involuntary or mandated psychiatric treatment, roles of clinical interpreters, clinicians’ roles in acting as intermediaries providing expert opinions to health care organizations or other commercial interests, and revisiting clinicians’ obligations in response to human trafficking.
Upon successful completion of all duties, Editorial Fellows receive a stipend of $3,000 (or split with co-Fellow).