Emergeny Medicine Resident Trauma Intubation Success and Prior Intubation Experience

Emergency medicine residents are often involved in the management of trauma airways. There are few data on the correlation between prior intubation experience and first-pass trauma intubation success for emergency medicine residents.

We attempted to elucidate a relationship between prior resident intubation experience and first-pass success for trauma patient intubation.

We combined two data sets to assess for correlation between prior intubation experience for postgraduate year 2 and 3 residents and first-pass success for trauma patient intubation. Prior intubation experience was gathered from resident procedure logs and trauma intubation data were collected as part of a quality-monitoring program. A univariable logistic regression analysis for all available variables was performed, with first-pass intubation success as the outcome of interest.

We included 295 consecutive trauma patients intubated at a Level I trauma center where we could link the resident prior intubation experience (total intubations) with intubation attempt quality data. First-pass success for all emergency medicine residents was 82.3% (233/283). Overall successful intubation rate for emergency medicine residents was 90.4% (256/283). The combination of airway management by both the resident and emergency medicine attending provided an overall success rate of 97.3% (287/295). There was no statistically significant association between first-pass success and prior resident intubation experience or any of the other measured variables.

We did not demonstrate any significant correlation between first-pass intubation success and number of prior intubations performed by the emergency medicine resident.