The Development of an Emergency Medicine Resident Research Program in the United States Military

Abstract

Abstract Introduction The Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education stipulates that residents should participate in scholarly activity. As of 2019 that verbiage will be changed to, “Residents must participate in scholarship.” However, scholarly activity is not clearly defined. We set out to define our graduation research requirement in a measurable way and structure a research curriculum that better prepared residents to conduct scholarly activity. Materials and Methods This study compares resident scholarly output in several categories before and after the initiation of a revised research curriculum and graduation requirement. Scholarly activity was measured by comparing the production of Pubmed Indexed (PMID) publications, online publications, and conference presentations of two Emergency Medicine Residency classes. The intervention class was represented by the class of 2018 which exposed 16 residents to the new curriculum and graduation requirement for the full three years of their residency. The comparison class was represented by the class of 2015 which exposed 16 residents to the old curriculum and old graduation requirement. The old graduation requirement and curriculum were undefined. The new requirement involved two options, participate in original research starting from the process of question formulation and carried through manuscript drafting or publishing at first author PMID of any kind. The new curriculum involved monthly journal clubs, two annual deep dives, and an 8-day Intern Research Course modeled after the Emergency Medicine Basic Research Skills workshop sponsored by the American College of Emergency Physicians. In addition to the new curriculum, several new leadership positions were created at both the staff and resident level that solely focused on the promotion of scholarly activity. In addition to creating a culture within the department that encouraged scholarship, these overlapping leadership positions also helped create continuity in a program that could easily be hampered by frequent staff turnover due to new military assignments and military deployments. Results Resident scholarly activity in the form of PMIDs increased from 4 to 22. The production of online publications was 0 and 12, respectively. There were 2 and 11 conference presentations, respectively. Conclusion Resident scholarly activity increased following the institution of a new research curriculum and graduation requirement.