Welcome to the beginning of the most exciting and terrifying time in your residency — the start to a new year! To help start the year off right a group of chief residents from across the country, through the ALiEM Chief Resident Incubator, have gotten together and compiled a list of ways for chief residents (and other resident leaders) to engage residents early to hopefully make this the best year yet of residency.
Congratulations, you’ve made it! On July 1, thousands of medical students across the country made the transition to becoming Emergency Medicine residents. It was a particularly competitive year for Emergency Medicine, with 99.7% of first-year spots filled despite a whopping 2,047 positions being offered in 2017 (up by 152 spots compared to last year).1 Now begins the most crucial 3 or 4 years of your medical training that will prepare you for the rest of your career in Emergency Medicine.
Members and mentors of the inaugural, 2016-17 ALiEM Faculty Incubator authored 9 narrative reviews in the Academic Primer Series and Curated Collections for Educators on several important medical education topics, which highlight the most important literature and their defined importance for junior educators and faculty developers. To ensure broad compendiums of articles were obtained on each subject, collections of papers were augmented via an open call for additional papers using Twitter. Subsequently, a selection panel comprised of both junior and seasoned educators utilized a 3-round modified Delphi process to identify the best, most relevant papers for medical educators.
Every year, emergency medicine (EM) residents take the In-Training Exam (ITE) to test their medical knowledge and predict the likelihood of passing their official written board examination upon completion of residency training. The Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education (ACGME) requires all EM residencies to include weekly didactics in order to build the knowledge base of residents and facilitate preparation for the written and oral American Board of Emergency Medicine (ABEM) or American Osteopathic Board of Emergency Medicine (AOBEM) examinations. These didactics, however, often consists of traditional lecture formats. In contrast, according to the testing effect, we know that taking a test on material improves retention more than just passively hearing or reading the information alone.
(more…)
The American Board of Emergency Medicine (ABEM), American Osteopathic Board of Emergency Medicine (AOBEM), and the Royal College of Emergency Medicine (RCEM) require successful completion of an oral examination as part of the certification process for the specialty of emergency medicine. Residents are seldom taught explicitly about the process of developing oral board examinations. While deliberate and guided practice can improve performance in such examinations, understanding the design and structure of an oral examination can also ease anxiety about the experience.
We are very excited to officially announce the NEW 2017-18 ALiEM Faculty Incubator Class of Educator-Scholars! We received applications from across the country and internationally with broad ranges of background and experiences. We narrowed it down to the top 30 applicants, who we know are budding leaders in the field.
After receiving numerous high-quality submissions, we are proud to announce the winner of the 2017 Essentials of Emergency Medicine (EEM) Education Fellowship Contest as Dr. Moises Gallegos from the Baylor Emergency Medicine residency program. His winning blog post is featured today on the pearls and pitfalls of epistaxis management. We look forward to seeing him in person in Las Vegas in May 2017 at the 3-day event as well as the Resident Wellness Consensus Summit preday.