Career Development Guidance and Mentorship during Anesthesia Residency Training: An Internet Survey

We conducted a survey of Anesthesiology residency programs in the United States to identify current practice regarding mentorship and teaching of topics related to career development.

Program directors for all currently accredited Anesthesiology residency programs (N=129 as of April 2016) were contacted by e-mail and invited to complete a short internet survey. Two follow-up e-mails were sent at one-week intervals to those who had not yet responded.

59 program directors responded, yielding 53 complete responses, for an adjusted response rate of 41.1%. Program and practice management type (university versus other, hospital versus private) were not strongly associated with presence of a career development curriculum (CDC). In general, larger residency programs (30 or more residents) and university-based programs were more likely to provide lectures on specific CDC topics. Whether residency program directors agreed or disagreed with the premise that instruction should be provided on other topics besides anesthesia, was unrelated to the presence of CDC in their programs.

The results of this survey demonstrate that the establishment of a mentorship program (even a rudimentary one) may be the first step in creating a CDC. Apart from having a CDC program already in place, the strongest predictor of CDC content was the size of the residency program. Though there are training programs that openly stated on our survey that they do not have a CDC in place, some of these programs still provided lectures on one or more of the topics surveyed.