Emergency Medicine Residents in the Prehospital Setting: Does This Augment Training?

Emergency medicine (EM) residency curricula are designed to prepare future physicians for independent practice. Although the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education requires that EM residents have prehospital experiences, very few programs augment this experience with a dedicated resident response vehicle. There are minimal data demonstrating the utility of such an approach. Our residency program staffs a dedicated response vehicle with a PGY-2/3 resident 24/7/365 to respond to high-acuity emergency medical services (EMS) calls. Additionally, from 0800 to 2300, the on-duty resident provides on-line medical control (OLMC) for the county. Each resident averages one 24-h shift per 4-week EM block. The purpose of this study is to describe the prehospital educational experiences and curricular contributions that this program provides.

We used a retrospective observational study design of administrative patient care records over a 5-year period. The primary outcomes were the number of unique encounters and patient experiences per resident per cohort year. The secondary outcomes included characterization of the prehospital experiences among all residents: physician role, patient age-group and sex, problem type, scene location, and procedures. Descriptive statistics were computed to quantify the number, type, and characteristics of the prehospital encounters.

Ninety unique resident users were identified in the charting system. The mean number of encounters per resident was grouped by graduation year and spanned from 28.7 (SD 15) for 2018 to 79.2 (SD 49.2) for 2022, with a range of 2-222 encounters per resident documented. Over the study period, our residents managed 1313 out-of-hospital cardiac arrests (34 pediatric), 1048 refusals, 596 death pronouncements, 172 critical trauma patients, and answered 2053 complex OLMC consults.

This study quantified the prehospital experiences of our senior EM residents with the addition of a physician response vehicle to our longitudinal EMS curriculum. This has allowed our residents to gain valuable first-hand exposure to out-of-hospital adult and pediatric cardiac arrests, refusals of care, altered mental status, and respiratory emergencies, in addition to prehospital scenarios not likely to be seen within the hospital walls, including motor vehicle collisions with entrapment and mass casualty incidents.