Impact and Influence of a Teaching Resident Rotation on Emergency Medicine Resident Physicians

The Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education requires residency programs to train their residents to be teachers. Teaching resident (TR) rotations in emergency medicine (EM) residency programs provide both an opportunity to train residents in teaching skills and a dedicated teaching service for junior learners in the clinical setting. The impact that this experience has on the residents themselves is unknown. We sought to explore the impact of our residency program's TR rotation on our recent graduates.

We conducted a qualitative study using semistructured interviews. We recruited our residency program's recent graduates and interviewed participants over a videoconferencing platform. We used a constructivist paradigm to guide our thematic analysis.

We interviewed 11 graduates and identified major themes regarding how the TR rotation impacted their comfort and preparedness to teach and supervise learners postgraduation: discovery of their teaching identity, communication skills, development of teaching and supervisory skills, and professional development.

EM residents found TR rotations helpful in developing skills that prepared them to educate learners and supervise patient care postgraduation. The findings of this study may inform the use and development of TR rotations in EM and other specialties.