A man and a dog walk into a bar. . .
Yesterday, I spoke to a emergency medicine program director James Turner, DO, who used a joke to sum up exactly why training programs need to look at the numbers behind residents’ performance and outcomes data.
Here’s the joke:
A man and his dog walk into a bar. The bartender looks over and says, “Sir, you can’t bring your dog in here.”
And the man replies, “But this dog is a special dog! I taught him to talk.”
The bartender, very impressed, tells the man to sit down at the bar with his dog and tries to strike up a conversation with the gifted pooch. After five minutes, the dog still has not made a sound, and the bartender looks up at the man and says, “There’s no way this dog can talk.”
To which the man replies, “I never said he could talk; I just said I taught him how to.”
Without analyzing residents’ evaluations and compiling performance data reports, how are programs supposed to know if what they’re teaching is working. . . if residents are actually learning?
All too often, we look at evaluations as an indicator of how a specific resident is doing in a specific function or skill. Residency program leadership should also remember to look at them as an indicator of how their teaching efforts are being received.
Look out for an article in April’s Residency Program Alert featuring Dr. Turner talking about assessment measures his program uses to evaluate residents’ skill level during orientation.
How often does your program look at residents’ performance across the board? Who compiles and analyzes the data and is responsible for leading change?
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Residency Program Alert
Residency Program Alert is the only monthly resource that brings you best practices and tools from the most well-respected experts working in the field.
RPA has written 15 posts.
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