Procedure rates performed by emergency medicine residents: a retrospective review

The purpose of our study is to investigate rates of individual procedures performed by residents in our emergency medicine (EM) residency program. Different programs expose residents to different training environments. Our hypothesis is that ultrasound examinations are the most commonly performed procedure in our residency.

The study took place in an academic level I trauma center with multiple residency and fellowship programs including surgery, surgical critical care, trauma, medicine, pulmonary/critical care, anesthesiology and others. Also, the hospital provides a large emergency medical services program providing basic and advanced life support and critical care transport, which is capable of performing rapid sequence intubation. Each EM residency class, except for the first 2 months of the inaugural class, used New Innovations to log procedures. New Innovations is an online database for tracking residency requirements, such as procedures and hours. For the first 3 months, procedures were logged by hand on a log sheet. In addition, our department has a wireless electronic system (Qpath) for recording and logging ultrasound images. These logs were reviewed retrospectively without any patient identifiers.

Actual procedures and simulation procedures were combined for analysis as they were only logged separately halfway through the study period. Procedures were summed and the average procedure rate per resident per year was calculated.

In total, 66 full resident years were analyzed. Overall, ultrasound was the most commonly performed procedure, with each resident performing 125 ultrasounds per year. Removing “resuscitations,” the second most common was endotracheal intubation, performed 28.91 times per year, and third most was laceration repair, which was performed 17.39 times per year.

Our lowest performed procedure was thoracentesis, which was performed on average 0.11 times per resident per year.

Residents performed a variety of procedures each year. Ultrasound examinations were the most frequent procedure performed. The number of ultrasound procedures performed may reflect the changing training landscape and influence future Accreditation Council of Graduate Medical Education requirements.