Academic emergency medicine : official journal of the Society for Academic Emergency Medicine
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Despite an increasing number of elderly emergency department (ED) patients, emergency medicine (EM) residency training lacks geriatric-specific curricula. The objective was to determine if a 1-year geriatric curriculum, designed for residents, would affect residents' attitudes, knowledge, and decision-making for older patients seen in the ED. ⋯ Geriatric educational curricula for EM residents may positively affect knowledge base and appropriate decision-making when working with older adults in the ED. These educational enhancements may place elderly patients at less risk of adverse outcomes.
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Emergency medicine (EM) residency programs are increasingly asked to have measurable outcomes of residents' performance. Successful completion of the written and oral American Board of Emergency Medicine (ABEM) examinations is one key outcome. In the clinical practice of EM, emergency physicians (EPs) are often measured by their clinical productivity (patients per hour). This study explored the correlation between these measures of academic and clinical performance and hypothesized that clinical productivity would have a positive association with ABEM performance. ⋯ PGY3 resident clinical productivity, when measured as patients per hour, correlated poorly with academic performance when measured by written and oral ABEM scores. The PGY3 in-training examination was predictive of the ABEM written and oral examination scores.
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Exposure to emergency medicine (EM) is a crucial aspect of medical student education, yet one that is historically absent from third-year medical student training. There are limited data describing the existing third-year rotations. The goal of this study is to identify the content and structure of current EM rotations specific to third-year students. ⋯ There is variability in the content and structure of existing third-year EM rotations, as well as in financial and administrative needs and support. These data can help to inform CDs and departments that are starting or modifying EM third-year rotations, as well as contribute to the development of curricula for such rotations.
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The Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education requires residency training programs to teach and assess professionalism in residents; however, programs may struggle to successfully remediate residents not meeting professionalism standards. To assist programs with this complex issue, a Professionalism Remediation Task Force was formed by the Council of Emergency Medicine Residency Directors (CORD-EM), which surveyed program directors (PDs) concerning their experiences. The purpose of this study is to report survey results regarding the identification and rating of unprofessional behaviors and challenges in the evaluation and remediation of professionalism. ⋯ Identification and remediation of professionalism in EM residents is challenging. A future goal is to create a system by which PDs can use standardized pathways as a guide to identify and remediate unprofessional conduct.
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Regression techniques are versatile in their application to medical research because they can measure associations, predict outcomes, and control for confounding variable effects. As one such technique, logistic regression is an efficient and powerful way to analyze the effect of a group of independent variables on a binary outcome by quantifying each independent variable's unique contribution. Using components of linear regression reflected in the logit scale, logistic regression iteratively identifies the strongest linear combination of variables with the greatest probability of detecting the observed outcome. ⋯ The resulting logistic regression model's overall fit to the sample data is assessed using various goodness-of-fit measures, with better fit characterized by a smaller difference between observed and model-predicted values. Use of diagnostic statistics is also recommended to further assess the adequacy of the model. Finally, results for independent variables are typically reported as odds ratios (ORs) with 95% confidence intervals (CIs).