You learn best when you are engaged with the material. With that in mind, we aspire to make our 5 hours of protected weekly conference as engaging, and thus effective, as possible. From sim sessions to journal clubs and cadaver labs to small group discussions our goal is for conference to be one of the highlights of your week as a learner in our department!
There is nothing educationally magic about a 60-minute lecture and thus we work hard to vary up not just how we teach but the duration of sessions throughout our conference. We work to ensure that less than 30% of our conference sessions are “traditional” hour-long didactics. Further, it is vital to learn effective teaching skills as a resident. These are transferable skills to your career regardless of your future in academia or community medicine. As such, each class contributes to conference in a variety of ways making us all buy into the educational experience even more.
While no conference would be complete with some of the old faithfuls of EM education (i.e. mortality & morbidity, journal club, etc.), we organize our conference around our pillars of what skills define the practice of emergency physicians:
Expert Diagnosticians – From monthly POCUS sessions to our R1’s teaching us effective review of various imaging modalities to Clinico-Pathologic Case discussions between and R2 and attending, we try to break away from talking about specific diagnoses and instead revolve our thinking about what concerns patients actually present with (because how often do patients arrive saying “this is my TTP acting up?!?").
Master Resuscitationists – Sessions range from deep dives on various patterns of traumatic injuries with our trauma surgeons to quick hit toxicology pearls from our faculty. Our EM-intensivists lead multiple sessions in our conference to help us understand both the evidence and physiology underlying how we can maximize outcomes for our sickest patients. Further, managing the emergent airway is more than just a technical skill and we pride ourselves on building some of the most robust cognitive approaches to an airway so that when the one you never imagined shows up to your ED, you’re ready to handle it!
Skilled Advocates – No curriculum in EM is complete if you are not prepared to show up to every shift ready to improve the lives of those around you. To do this, you must not just recognize, but leverage the social determinants of health to benefit your patient’s outcomes. We, also, incorporate quarterly small group sessions on balancing the art and science of leadership into your professional life, whether that be in your small town ED or in front of your local legislature.
