Endotracheal intubation skill acquisition by medical students

During the course of their training, medical students may receive introductory experience with advanced resuscitation skills. Endotracheal intubation (ETI--the insertion of a breathing tube into the trachea) is an example of an important advanced resuscitation intervention. Only limited data characterize clinical ETI skill acquisition by medical students. We sought to characterize medical student acquisition of ETI procedural skill.

The study included third-year medical students participating in a required anesthesiology clerkship. Students performed ETI on operating room patients under the supervision of attending anesthesiologists. Students reported clinical details of each ETI effort, including patient age, sex, Mallampati score, number of direct laryngoscopies and ETI success. Using mixed-effects regression, we characterized the adjusted association between ETI success and cumulative ETI experience.

ETI was attempted by 178 students on 1,646 patients (range 1-23 patients per student; median 9 patients per student, IQR 6-12). Overall ETI success was 75.0% (95% CI 72.9-77.1%). Adjusted for patient age, sex, Mallampati score and number of laryngoscopies, the odds of ETI success improved with cumulative ETI encounters (odds ratio 1.09 per additional ETI encounter; 95% CI 1.04-1.14). Students required at least 17 ETI encounters to achieve 90% predicted ETI success.

In this series medical student ETI proficiency was associated with cumulative clinical procedural experience. Clinical experience may provide a viable strategy for fostering medical student procedural skills.