Document Type

Article

Publication Date

2022

DOI

10.1186/s12909-022-03801-0

Publication Title

BMC Medical Education

Volume

22

Issue

1

Pages

754 (1-7)

Abstract

Background: Medical school academic achievements do not necessarily predict house staff job performance. This study explores a selection mechanism that improves house staff-program fit that enhances the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education Milestones performance ratings.

Objective: Traditionally, house staff were selected primarily on medical school academic performance. To improve residency performance outcomes, the Program designed a theory-driven selection tool to assess house staff candidates on their personal values and goals fit with Program values and goals. It was hypothesized cohort performance ratings will improve because of the intervention.

Methods: Prospective quasi-experimental cohort design with data from two house staff cohorts at a university-based categorical Internal Medicine Residency Program. The intervention cohort, comprising 45 house staff from 2016 to 2017, was selected using a Behaviorally Anchored Rating Scales (BARS) tool for program fit. The control cohort, comprising 44 house staff from the prior year, was selected using medical school academic achievement scores. House staff performance was evaluated using ACGME Milestones indicators. The mean scores for each category were compared between the intervention and control cohorts using Student's t-tests with Bonferroni correction and Cohen's d for effect size.

Results: The cohorts were no different in academic performance scores at time of Program entry. The intervention cohort outperformed the control cohort on all 6 dimensions of Milestones by end-PGY1 and 3 of 6 dimensions by mid-PGY3.

Conclusion: Selecting house staff based on compatibility with Residency Program values and objectives may yield higher job performance because trainees benefit more from a better fit with the training program.

Rights

This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0), which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated in a credit line to the data.

Data Availability

Article States: Under the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA) (20 U.S.C. § 1232 g; 34 CFR Part 99), the raw data cannot be released. However, summary data is available from the first author upon reasonable request.

Original Publication Citation

Lee, S. H., Phan, P. H., & Desai, S. V. (2022). Evaluation of house staff candidates for program fit: A cohort-based controlled study. BMC Medical Education, 22(1), 1-7, Article 754. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12909-022-03801-0

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