Assessment of resident physicians' performance in a university hospital's emergency department

Objective. To describe an experience with the evaluation of resident physicians doing rotations in a tertiary-care hospital emergency department and to analyze the correlation between results on the various assessment tools and the resident's rank on Spain's standardized selection examination for admission to residency programs. Methods. The residents took 2 written examinations in 2013 and 2014, and rotation supervisors wrote subjective evaluations of the residents' clinical performance in the workplace. The residents also provided self-assessments of theoretical and practical knowledge and their aptitude for emergency department work. The results on these assessment tools were tabulated independently, and it was investigated if there were correlations between them. Results. We observed an inverse correlation between the residents' rank on the standardized selection examination and their scores on the written examinations of knowledge and the supervisors' workplace assessments. The written examination scores after the rotation correlated positively with workplace assessments. Self-assessments were distributed normally, suggesting they were of scarce value, and they did not correlate with the results of the other assessment tools. Conclusions. Written examinations are acceptably correlated with subjective workplace assessments of practical competencies, whereas ranking on the residency program admissions examination is not acceptably correlated with emergency department workplace performance. We believe that efforts to prepare ways to evaluate residents' emergency department performance will be of interest in the future, once a specialization in emergency medicine is approved.