Abstract
Background
Emergency medicine (EM) residency programs have significant scheduling flexibility.
As a result, there is potentially significant variation in scheduling practices. Few
studies have previously sought to describe this variation. It is unknown how this
affects training time in the emergency department.
Objectives
The purpose of this study was to describe the current variation in clinical training
practices through clinical hour, shift length, and rotation survey data.
Methods
A 21-item questionnaire was distributed to all allopathic EM training programs utilizing
an online survey during the 2011–2012 academic year. Questions included demographic
data, number of EM rotations per year, shifts, average hours, shift length, and scheduling
practices.
Results
A total of 122 responses were received and 82 programs were analyzed (51.6% of 159
allopathic programs). EM residents work, on average, 45.50 h per week. Postgraduate
year 1–3 programs utilizing 28-day schedules averaged two additional EM rotations
and 338.2 more clinical EM hours compared with calendar-month rotations. The residents
of 4-year programs work approximately 1300 additional hours during residency, with
an average of 1279.26 h and 7.9 clinical EM rotations in the fourth year. Clinical
hour ranges of 2670–5112 and 4248–6113 were observed for 3-year and 4-year programs,
respectively.
Conclusions
There are different scheduling modalities used to create resident schedules. This
flexibility results in a large amount of diversity in scheduling practices, with certain
patterns allowing for significantly more clinical time. This may result in a vastly
different training experience for EM residents.
Keywords
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Article info
Publication history
Published online: January 24, 2015
Accepted:
November 16,
2014
Received in revised form:
October 29,
2014
Received:
June 26,
2014
Footnotes
This study was reviewed and approved by an internal Institutional Review Board with waiver of consent.
Identification
Copyright
© 2015 Elsevier Inc. Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
