Progression of Emergency Medicine Resident Patient Experience Scores by Level of Training

Patient satisfaction surveys are vital to measuring a patient's experience of care. How scores of patients managed by emergency medicine (EM) residents change as residents progress through training is not known.

To evaluate whether EM residents' patient satisfaction scores improve as residency training progresses, similar to clinical skill improvement.

A retrospective cross-sectional study evaluated the correlation of patient satisfaction scores with EM resident year of training from 2015 through 2017. We evaluated for a change in score over time for the 4 "physician questions" and the "overall" score.

We evaluated 1684 Press Ganey surveys linked to 40 EM resident physicians during the study period. The mean top box scores for the 4 physician questions (concern for comfort [P = .72], courtesy [P = .55], informative about treatment [P = .46], and listening [P = .91]) and overall assessment of emergency department care (P = .51) were not significantly improved over the course of resident.

We did not observe a difference in EM residents' patient experience scores as their level of training progressed. Comprehensive patient experience training for residents might be needed.