Chicago, IL, February 8, 2022: The American Board of Preventive Medicine (ABPM) announced today that the Board of Directors of the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education (ACGME) approved the ABPM’s request for separate designations for each of the three Preventive Medicine Specialties of Aerospace Medicine, Occupational Medicine, and Public Health and General Preventive Medicine. While these new designations recognize the inherent differences in the ABPM’s individual Specialties, the current design does not change the structure or responsibilities of the Preventive Medicine Review Committee which shall retain responsibility for the supervision and review of the entire complement of ACGME-accredited Preventive Medicine residency programs.

With this update, the Specialties will be listed separately on the ACGME’s website and the ABPM will work with the Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC) and the American Medical Association (AMA). Specifically, ABPM will work with the AAMC and AMA so that the AAMC’s Residency Explorer tool and the Electronic Residency Application Service (ERAS) along with the AMA’s Fellowship and Residency Electronic Interactive Database (FREIDA) will list Aerospace Medicine, Occupational Medicine, and Public Health & General Preventive Medicine separately, thereby greatly increasing awareness of each of ABPM’s Specialties among medical school students and physicians searching for career paths in preventive medicine.

“We are very grateful to our colleagues at ACGME and our Specialty societies, who partnered with us to accomplish this important task,” said ABPM Board Chair, Wendy E. Braund, MD, MPH, MSEd, FACPM. “Although the designation of the three separate Preventive Medicine Specialties will not affect a material change to residency program requirements, we expect it to make a great impact on physicians’ ability to find these Specialties, each of which offer an attractive career path in medicine.”

Since all three Specialties will remain under a common Review Committee, residency programs will not see any major changes to their program requirements. ACGME will post the updated program requirements on its website for a period of public review and comment, after which the program requirements will be submitted to the ACGME Board of Directors for its final review in June 2022.

The ABPM is an ABMS Member Board. Founded in 1948, ABPM works with the ABMS in the development of standards for the ongoing assessment and certification of over 12,000 physicians certified by the ABPM in the specialties of Aerospace Medicine, Occupational Medicine, and Public Health and General Preventive Medicine; and in the subspecialties of Addiction Medicine, Clinical Informatics, Medical Toxicology, and Undersea and Hyperbaric Medicine.