Analysis of resident and attending physician interactions in family medicine

Residents accompany attending physicians around the hospital in order to be trained as physicians. Verbal teaching and learning behaviors in the interaction between residents and attending physicians were observed, classified and recorded in order to evaluate clinical teaching methods. Over the course of one year, 125 observations of the interaction between residents and attending physicians were recorded. The average length of the interaction lasted for four minutes; three quarters of the average meeting was spent discussing patient care issues, allowing very little time for teaching. The contribution of the resident-attending physician interaction in the training of a resident is questioned.
Clinical teaching does not fit neatly into traditional teaching-learning models. The interaction between a resident and an attending physician is of particular interest because it has several functions including education, supervision, socialization, and quality control. The purpose of this study was to observe, classify, and record verbal teaching and learning behaviors in the resident-attending physician interaction. During a 12-month period, 125 observations of resident-attending physician interactions were recorded; the average length of the interactions was 4.27 minutes. The six most frequent resident verbal behaviors compared by postgraduate year level did not vary significantly. Only one of the six most frequent attending physician verbal behaviors varied significantly. In the average interaction of about 4 minutes, three fourths of the interaction was on patient care issues, leaving the little time for teaching. There are many unanswered questions about the resident-attending physician interaction and its contribution to the training of a physician.
Analysis of Resident and Attending Physician Interactions in Family Medicine There has been increasing interest in defining, describing, and analyzing clinical teaching, particularly in the ambulatory setting. Most clinical teaching [...]