Interdisciplinary development of an adult intubation procedural checklist

There are multiple procedural skills common to all residency programs. This study had two main objectives: (1) Use an interdisciplinary team to develop a procedural competency checklist for adult endotracheal intubation that could be shared across specialty programs and levels of training and (2) Evaluate the validity and reliability of the checklist.

Clinical faculty from the institutional residency programs for family medicine, emergency medicine, obstetrics, and the simulation laboratory developed the initial checklist. Face validity and content validity of the checklist was established using literature review, expert opinion, and Lawshe's Content Validity Ratio. A training DVD was produced to standardize teaching and evaluation use of the checklist. Four teams of two physician raters representing a mix of specialty (family medicine, emergency medicine, obstetrics) and skill levels (clinical faculty and residents) were used to test inter-rater reliability of the checklist.

A convenience sample of 35 residents from family medicine, emergency medicine, and obstetrics participated. Bland and Altman's method for measuring differences between raters was used to test inter-rater reliability. No differences were found between raters based on specialty area or level of training.

Procedural skills common to multiple specialty residency programs can be taught and evaluated across residency programs when a standardized training program and checklist is used. Resources could be maximized by offering training and evaluation sessions across resident specialty programs that are cooperatively staffed by evaluators of different levels of training and specialty backgrounds.