Through the Looking Glass: Comparing Hospitalists' and Internal Medicine Residents' Perceptions of Feedback

Feedback is critical for resident growth and is most effective when the relationship between residents and attendings is collaborative, with shared expectations for the purpose, timing, and manner of communication for feedback. Within internal medicine, there is limited work exploring the resident and hospitalist perspectives on whether key elements are included in feedback sessions.

We surveyed internal medicine residents and supervising hospitalists at a large urban training program about their perspectives on four components of effective feedback: specificity,timeliness, respectful communication, and actionability.

We received surveys from 130/184 internal medicine residents and 74/129 hospitalists (71% and 57% response rate, respectively). Residents and hospitalists differed in their perspectives about specificity and timeliness: 54% (70/129) of residents reported they did not receive specific feedback while 90% (65/72) of hospitalists reported they delivered specific feedback (p<0.01), and 33% (43/129) of residents compared with 82% (59/72) of hospitalists perceived feedback as timely (p<0.01). Internal medicine residents and hospitalists reported concordant rates of feedback sessions consisting of a two-way conversation (84%, 109/129; 89%, 64/72, respectively, p=0.82) and that communication was delivered in a respectful manner (95%, 122/129; 97%, 70/72, respectively, p=0.57).

We observed discordance between internal medicine residents and supervising hospitalist perspectives on the inclusion of two critical components of feedback: specificity and timing. The hospitalist cohort reported delivering more components of effective feedback than the resident cohort reported receiving. The etiology of this discordance is likely multifactorial and requires further investigation.