Background: In hospital-based medicine, maintaining an open line of communication between inpatient teams and community pediatricians serves as an essential component of providing comprehensive patient care and ensuring continuity at time of discharge. At St. Louis Children’s Hospital, inpatient resident teams are responsible for providing timely communication with community pediatricians regarding major patient events. Despite [...]

Background: Communication between hospital and outpatient clinicians is a key component to successful care transitions for older adults, yet this communication is frequently lacking. In addition, residents in academic medical centers are not routinely provided with feedback about post-discharge outcomes or opportunities for improvement. Purpose: To implement weekly video conferences that utilize the electronic medical [...]

Background: Sitting at the bedside improves patients’ perception of their interactions with their physicians. Despite these data, prior work shows that medicine interns sit during only 9% of observed physician-patient interactions. We aimed to assess perceived importance of and barriers to sitting at the bedside among a group of internal medicine residents. These results have [...]

Background: Point-of-Care-Ultrasound (POCUS) is increasingly recognized as a useful diagnostic tool in hospital medicine. US-based resident physicians are increasingly trained in the use of POCUS, but education and training for hospitalist attendings may lag behind creating a potential safety gap in supervision. We developed a test assessing knowledge of routine applications of POCUS used in [...]

Background: Senior residents often serve as the primary educator for medical students and interns on their inpatient medicine rotations. Additionally, the act of teaching enhances the resident’s own knowledge acquisition and retention. Although residents desire to teach more, insufficient time is a barrier to preparing and providing teaching. Thus, senior residents require adequate resources to [...]

Background: Multidisciplinary (MDR) team rounds were established at Halifax hospital as daily, dedicated interactions between varying members of the care team on each inpatient floor. Members of the care team include physicians, nurses, physical therapists, pharmacists, and case managers. These multidisciplinary interactions allow for smooth, real-time, and accurate information that facilitate communication and enhance the [...]

Background: The American Board of Internal Medicine suggests residents participate in a minimum of five abdominal paracentesis (AP), central venous catheter (CVC) placements, and lumbar punctures to ensure “adequate knowledge and understanding” of procedures performed by practicing internists. Competency in these procedures is poorly defined and difficult to assess. To address the need for well-supervised, [...]

Background: Emerging evidence demonstrates that medical mentorship programs are beneficial in creating the ideal learning environment, in career guidance, and mentee wellness. The majority of current studies on medical mentorship are focused on relationships between resident and attending physicians in procedural-oriented specialties; there are minimal studies with the resident as mentor. Purpose: With the goal [...]

Background: At academic centers the work of discharge planning has historically fallen on housestaff. The medical education community’s efforts to improve the trainee experience have led to an iterative process of duty hour reform and re-design. One effect has been “work compression” – each day a trainee is required to complete more tasks in less [...]

Background: Although residency programs strive to train residents in effective teaching, few tools to provide direct observation and feedback exist. In our prior work, we developed and validated observed structured teaching exercises (OSTEs) for pediatric and internal medicine residents. Exercises include providing feedback on a presentation, teaching on rounds, teaching at the bedside, and giving [...]