Resident Clinical Exposure Variability at Graduation
Abstract
Learning Objectives: To quantify individual differences in resident clinical exposure during training at a 3-year academic emergency medicine residency.Background: Experiential learning theory suggests that clinical exposures during residency are critical to developing expertise. Research in other specialties has shown significant individual differences in resident clinical exposures during training, but this has not been recently evaluated in emergency medicine (EM).
Objective: To quantify individual differences in resident clinical exposure during training at a 3-year academic emergency medicine residency.
Methods: We performed a retrospective review of electronic health records from 2013-2021 at our main clinical site (of four) to quantify the number and type of clinical encounters seen by each resident. Visits were attributed to the first assigned resident. We included data from residents who completed all three years of residency consecutively. We categorized primary patient chief complaints according to the 20 domains of the ABEM Model of Clinical Practice following a published consensus method with EM faculty. We calculated and reported descriptive statistics.
Results: We collected data from 70 residents. Means and ranges of exposures in the top 10 most commonly identified domains are displayed in Figure 1.
Conclusions: We found variability in resident clinical exposures at our primary training site. Residencies may benefit from examining resident clinical exposures to identify opportunities for individual resident improvements.