Considering Burnout and Well-Being: Emergency Medicine Resident Shift Scheduling Platform and Satisfaction Insights from a Quality Improvement Project.

Few studies explore emergency medicine (EM) residency shift scheduling software as a mechanism to reduce administrative demands and broader resident burnout. A local needs assessment demonstrated a learning curve for chief resident schedulers and several areas for improvement. In an institutional quality improvement project, we utilized an external online cross-sectional convenience sampling pilot survey of United States EM residency programs to collect information on manual versus software-based resident shift scheduling practices and associated scheduler and scheduler-perceived resident satisfaction. Our external survey response rate was 19/253 (8%), with all United States regions (i.e., northeast, southeast, midwest, west, and southwest) represented. Two programs (11%) reported manual scheduling without any software. ShiftAdmin was the most popularly reported scheduling software (53%). Although not statistically significant, manual scheduling had the lowest satisfaction score and programs with ≤30 residents reported the highest levels of satisfaction. Our data suggest that improvements in existing software-based technologies are needed. Artificial intelligence technologies may prove useful for reducing administrative scheduling demands and optimizing resident scheduling satisfaction.

Curated collections for educators: Nine key articles and article series for teaching qualitative research methods.

Background: Qualitative research explains observations, focusing on how and why phenomena and experiences occur. Qualitative methods go beyond quantitative data and provide critical information inaccessible through quantitative methods. However, at all levels of medical education, there is insufficient exposure to qualitative research. As a result, residents and fellows complete training ill-equipped to appraise and conduct qualitative studies. As a first step to increasing education in qualitative methods, we sought to create a curated collection of papers for faculty to use in teaching qualitative research at the graduate medical education (GME) level. Methods: We conducted literature searches on the topic of teaching qualitative research to residents and fellows and queried virtual medical education and qualitative research communities for relevant articles. We searched the reference lists of all articles found through the literature searches and online queries for additional articles. We then conducted a three-round modified Delphi process to select papers most relevant to faculty teaching qualitative research. Results: We found no articles describing qualitative research curricula at the GME level. We identified 74 articles on the topic of qualitative research methods. The modified Delphi process identified the top nine articles or article series most relevant for faculty teaching qualitative research. Several articles explain qualitative methods in the context of medical education, clinical care, or emergency care research. Two articles describe standards of high-quality qualitative studies, and one article discusses how to conduct the individual qualitative interview to collect data for a qualitative study. Conclusions: While we identified no articles reporting already existing qualitative research curricula for residents and fellows, we were able to create a collection of papers on qualitative research relevant to faculty seeking to teach qualitative methods. These papers describe key qualitative research concepts important in instructing trainees as they appraise and begin to develop their own qualitative studies.