The role for clinician educators in implementing healthcare improvement

Clinician educators-who work at the intersection of patient care and resident education-are well positioned to respond to calls for better, safer patient care and resident education. Explicit lessons that address implementing health care improvement and associated residency training came out of the Academic Chronic Care Collaboratives and include the importance of: (1) redesigning the clinical practice as a core component of the residency curriculum; (2) exploiting the efficiencies of the practice team; (3) replacing "faculty development" with "everyone's a learner;" (4) linking faculty across learning communities to build expertise; and (5) using rigorous methodology to design and evaluate interventions for practice redesign.

There has been progress in addressing three thorny academic faculty issues-professional satisfaction, promotion and publication. For example, consensus criteria have been proposed for both faculty promotion as well as the institutional settings that nurture academic health care improvement careers, and the SQUIRE Publication Guidelines have been developed as a general framework for scholarly improvement publications. Extensive curricular resources exist for developing the expert faculty cadre. Curricula from representative training programs include quantitative and qualitative research methods, statistical methodologies appropriate for measuring systems change, organizational culture, management, leadership and scholarly writing for the improvement literature.

Clinician educators-particularly those in general internal medicine-bear the principal responsibility for both patient care and resident training in academic departments of internal medicine. The intersection of these activities presents a unique opportunity for their playing a central role in implementing health care improvement and associated residency training. However, this role in academic settings will require an unambiguous development strategy both for faculty and their institutions.

Modification of an OSCE format to enhance patient continuity in a high-stakes assessment of clinical performance

Background: Traditional Objective Structured Clinical Examinations (OSCEs) are psychometrically sound but have the limitation of fragmenting complex clinical cases into brief stations. We describe a pilot study of a modified OSCE that attempts to balance a typical OSCE format with a semblance of a continuous, complex, patient case.

Methods: Two OSCE scenarios were developed. Each scenario involved a single standardized patient and was subdivided into three sequential 10 minute sections that assessed separate content areas and competencies. Twenty Canadian PGY-4 internal medicine trainees were assessed by trained examiner pairs during each OSCE scenario. Paired examiners rated participant performance independent of each other, on each section of each scenario using a validated global rating scale. Inter-rater reliabilities and Pearson correlations between ratings of the 3 sections of each scenario were calculated. A generalizability study was conducted. Participant and examiner satisfaction was surveyed.

Results: There was no main effect of section or scenario. Inter-rater reliability was acceptable. The g-coefficient was 0.68; four scenarios would achieve 0.80. Moderate correlations between sections of a scenario suggest a possible halo effect. The majority of examiners and participants felt that the modified OSCE provided a sense of patient continuity.

Conclusions: The modified OSCE provides another approach to the assessment of clinical performance. It attempts to balance the advantages of a traditional OSCE with a sense of patient continuity.

Training satisfaction for subspecialty fellows in internal medicine

Training satisfaction for subspecialty fellows in internal medicine: Findings from the Veterans Affairs (VA) Learners' Perceptions Survey

Background

Learner satisfaction assessment is critical in the design and improvement of training programs. However, little is known about what influences satisfaction and whether trainee specialty is correlated. A national comparison of satisfaction among internal medicine subspecialty fellows in the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) provides a unique opportunity to examine educational factors associated with learner satisfaction. We compared satisfaction across internal medicine fellows by subspecialty and compared factors associated with satisfaction between procedural versus non-procedural subspecialty fellows, using data from the Learners' Perceptions Survey (LPS), a validated survey tool.

Methods

We surveyed 2,221 internal medicine subspecialty fellows rotating through VA between 2001 and 2008. Learners rated their overall training satisfaction on a 100-point scale, and on a five-point Likert scale ranked satisfaction with items within six educational domains: learning, clinical, working and physical environments; personal experience; and clinical faculty/preceptor.

Results

Procedural and non-procedural fellows reported similar overall satisfaction scores (81.2 and 81.6). Non-procedural fellows reported higher satisfaction with 79 of 81 items within the 6 domains and with the domain of physical environment (4.06 vs. 3.85, p<0.001). Satisfaction with clinical faculty/preceptor and personal experience had the strongest impact on overall satisfaction for both. Procedural fellows reported lower satisfaction with physical environment.

Conclusions

Internal medicine fellows are highly satisfied with their VA training. Nonprocedural fellows reported higher satisfaction with most items. For both procedural and non-procedural fellows, clinical faculty/preceptor and personal experience have the strongest impact on overall satisfaction.