CORD

The Council of Residency Directors (CORD) in Emergency Medicine is next week in Denver.  This year's hot-button topic is the Milestones, the foundation of a new outcomes-based resident evaluation process.






I'll be presenting a research abstract called, "How Do Practicing Emergency Attendings Self-Evaluate on the Emergency Medicine Milestones?" at the Milestones Bootcamp session on March 6th.  It is a study which attempts to begin the process of independently validating the milestones.

As part of its Next Accreditation System, the ACGME commissioned committees to draft, endorse, and implement specialty specific milestones.  For EM, what ensued was a collaborative step wise process to create milestones which centered around the clear definition of what would be come to be known as Level 4, the minimum standard of competency needed to graduate residency and practice emergency medicine successfully.  The EM milestones will be used to track resident progress by residency programs beginning in the 2013 academic year. 

We have begun to attempt validation of the ACGME EM Milestones.  We will be recruiting representatives from residencies across the country to partner with us to explore the creation of a multicenter effort to continue to study the Milestones.  We will have a sign up after the talk on March 6th as well as at the poster session.

If you're interested in validating the milestones, post a comment or let's meet at CORD.

Excited,

Timothy Peck

Web 3.0

Many in academic medicine have not yet accepted the values of the social media revolution.  Many tell me that it is clumsy, disjointed, and the dilution of information makes that information less valuable.  Although my instinct is to be defensive of this medium in which I function, I unfortunately cannot disagree with these sentiments.

The other day I went to see Samuel Shem speak.  For those of you not familiar, he is the author of House of God which was a pivotal tell all semi-fiction novel about his intern year at Beth Israel in Boston.    

Are you a FOAMer?

Mike Cadogan and friends have taking a historic step in medical education.

FOAM is a concept of free open access meducation.

Help make medical education social, smart, and free.

Support FOAM here,

and check out the Global Medical Education Project here

- Timothy Peck, MD

Northeast EM Med Student Symposium - September 29th, 2012

Calling all Med Students:

The 3rd annual Northeast Emergency Medicine Student Symposium will be held on September 29th, 2012 at 12 noon to 5 PM on the Harvard Medical School Longwood Campus in Boston.

The symposium is hosted by the Harvard Emergency Medicine Interest Group (HMS EMIG) and a special thanks goes to the group's student leader Joshua Feblowitz for his hard work organizing the event.


Last year there were approximately 65 students from around the region.  This year we hope for more; students from New York City to New Hampshire have already registered.  Please note there is a small $10 registration fee to cover some of the costs.

The symposium is a key opportunity to network with other students interested in EM as well as with residents and faculty from Boston area programs.  Faculty and residents from both the Partners and the Beth Israel Deaconess HAEMR programs as well as from Boston Medical Center will be speaking.  The afternoon will wrap up with your choice of a splinting, SIM, or radiology workshop.

Sign up and I'll see you there,

- Timothy Peck, MD


 

Both Sides of the Table

If I may, a piece of advice to the new intern class of emergency medicine residents.

When you are on your surgery rotations, remember that you are an EM resident. If you operate on a patient, ask the anesthesiologist to intubate that patient too. It is very cool to be on one side of the table, scrub, and then assist the surgeon on the other side of the table. You are a multitasker.

The scrub nurse will not know what to make of you. After the surgery, ask the nurse to see their op-report. It will say that you intubated the patient and that you operated on the patient. This makes you special - you will be the only person in the hospital that will do this.

 - Tim Peck, MD

Call for Case Contributors to Modern EM

Want to write a case for Modern EM?

Modern EM is a blog in which case presentations are used to illustrate how Web 2.o resources can be used in the management of our patients.

Thanks to the support of the EM Web 2.o world (such as Academic Life in Emergency Medicine, Life in the Fast Lane, Wing of Zock, The Poison Review, and Rahul's EM Blog), the blog has hit the ground running and already received thousands of hits!

If you've had a case in which your managment was augmented or even changed by the likes of blogs, Twitter posts, web-based audio-visual resources, or apps, please don't keep it to yourself!  Sharing your story can help the EM community members be better practitioners. 

Together we can advocate for the improved use of technology in the ED. 

If you have an idea, contact me at iclickem.com@gmail.com.

- Timothy Peck, MD

SAEM's Emergency Medicine Milestones

The SAEM released its educational milestones on their website this week; these are a comprehensive set of skills that every emergency physician should possess by the time they graduate residency.  The resident's level of competence for each skill is graded on a 5 point scale.

The significance of the publication of these milestones is great.  I have often advocated to reevaluate the arbitrary means of granting graduation in medical education.  Just because you got through 3 or 4 years of residency, does not mean that you deserve to graduate residency (the same goes for medical school).  To be elevated from one level to the next, you should be required to prove that you have hit the necessary milestones to move on to the next level.  The recently published milestones can help make that a reality, and introduce a better system to ensure our patients that the physicians who take care of them are truely competent.  The ridiculousness of standardized paper board exams may be done away with or at least deprioritized.

EM Lyceum

EM Lyceum is a site created by NYU/Bellevue residents and moderated by one of my mentors, Dr. Anand Swaminathan.


The site poses a monthly series of questions about common topics in the ED like RSI and hyperkalemia.  Members are encouraged to read the questions at the beginning of the month and discuss them with colleagues.  At the end of the month, the site provides its own answers.

As a student at NYU, I was privy to the foundations of this idea while rotating through the department.  I was attempting to efficiently present a kidney stone case to my fourth year, but she slowed me down and said, "let's take some extra time to talk about this - renal stones are this month's topic."

A few other doctors stopped what they were doing for a moment, and we had a discussion about kidney stones from pathophys to disposition.  This 4 minute pause in the busy flow of the department created a meaningful and purposeful open discussion on a single topic as it applied to a real case in real time.

Check out EM Lyceum and join the conversation.

- Teach, MD

 If you like EM Lyceum, vote for it here on iClickEM