Issue Five 2024 Editor's Pick

 

Medical Students Help with Emergency Medicine Resident Efficiency

 

Throughout my 30+ year career in academic emergency medicine, I have repeatedly observed and had conversations around the push and pull relationship between the importance of clinical education for our learners and emergency department efficiency. According to cognitive load theory, there are limitations to the amount of information people can manage at a given time, and one can postulate that the addition to supervising/teaching medical students may be too much for an emergency medicine resident to manage. It is important to balance learning and efficient patient care in our departments.  

In the most recent issue of Academic Emergency Medicine Education and Training, Liang and team published PGY-2 emergency medicine residents are more efficient when paired with an early clinical medical student — a retrospective study of PGY-2 emergency medicine residents’ efficiency as measured by number of patients per hour residents saw with and without a medical student working with them. Despite what some may think, medical students did not hinder emergency medicine clinical productivity but rather enhanced it by enabling the resident to see more patients per hour. The investigators found that on shifts where residents were paired with medical students, the emergency medicine residents could see an additional 1.13 patients per hour as well as an additional 1.92 RVU per shift.

Susan B. Promes, MD, MBA
Penn State College of Medicine
Editor-in-Chief