Background: Transitioning from undergraduate medical education (UME) to graduate medical education (GME) can be a challenging time for learners as they assume new roles as physicians and adjust to a new clinical environment. Our role as medical educators can play a key part in easing this transition from medical student to resident. To bridge the gap between passive learning and real-world clinical situations, our program launched a new year-long didactic curriculum called Intern Survival Series.
Purpose: The primary goal of Intern survival series is to enhance a trainee’s education through active learning. We deliver education on evidence-based management practices utilizing a case-based approach that focuses on common patient scenarios. The secondary goal is to instill confidence in trainees when managing these patients on the wards. Intern survival series addresses multiple ACGME milestones, most importantly, inpatient patient management and clinical reasoning.
Description: Before beginning their training, all forty-one internal medicine interns were required to complete the AAIM internal medicine transition to residency individualized learner plans (ILP). We identified areas marked as “slightly prepared” or “not prepared at all” and developed lectures with input from clinical experts. Topics that over 60% of the interns highlighted included: recognizing a patient requiring emergent care, management of substance use disorders, gastrointestinal emergencies, neutropenic fevers and inpatient management of diabetes. We also included more practical hands-on sessions on inpatient workflow like how to do admissions, discharges and hand-offs to cross-coverage teams. These hourly sessions of protected learning occurred weekly and were led by chief residents with assistance from a faculty attending. A survey was conducted after the first eight weeks and all participants strongly agreed that it was a valuable learning experience that helped to alleviate uncertainties associated with beginning residency. Post-didactic surveys were obtained to assess real-time learning and efficacy of these lectures. In a lecture discussing management of diabetic ketoacidosis (DKA), 40% of participants could not recognize or treat DKA. This changed to all participants being neutral to very comfortable with treating DKA after the lecture.
Conclusions: Education dedicated to support a trainee’s transition from classroom-based learning to inpatient clinical setting is essential. Our curriculum shows a practical way to use ILPs to target weak areas and guide instruction based on the needs of our trainees. Our feedback from interns demonstrated that this year-long intern survival series can function as an effective training tool.