Tuesday, April 25, 2017

Aligning Resident and Medical Student Teaching Programs: Assessment of a novel training approach for future physician educators.

Robyn Bockrath
Ann & Robert H. Lurie Children's Hospital



Purpose: Resident and medical student teacher training programs have been established as essential for the development of future physicians, yet there remains significant variability in program curricula. In 2010 Northwestern University aligned undergraduate and graduate medical education teacher training programs to generate a program across the continuum, supporting experiential learning in feedback and teaching, near peer education and professional identity formation. The purpose of this study was to describe the curricular overview and participants in the aligned teacher training program and perform a multi-level program evaluation through analysis of narrative feedback quality and participant reactions.

Methods: Program evaluation occurred through a convergent parallel mixed methods approach, assessing the quality of narrative feedback provided from trainee teachers to junior learners utilizing a quality rating schema for feedback, independent coding and an expert panel to establish coding consensus. Post-training surveys were utilized to evaluate program satisfaction and perceived importance.

Results: Residents and medical students in the aligned training program provided high quality feedback with a relative quality rating of 2.71 and 2.81 (scale 0-3). Frequency of strong feedback increased with each academic year and by increasing years of resident participation in the program. Post-training surveys demonstrated satisfaction and perceived importance of the program to medical student and resident participants.

Conclusions: The aligned teacher training program across the undergraduate and graduate medical education continuum provided satisfactory experiential learning opportunities in teaching and feedback and high quality feedback to learners.