Faculty Development 4 Tips to Set Junior Faculty Members Up for a Successful Shift With a Resident Physician

4 Tips to Set Junior Faculty Members Up for a Successful Shift With a Resident Physician

By Shehzad Muhamed, MD

Just one month ago, we welcomed our inaugural class of emergency medicine (EM) residents at Northeast Georgia Medical Center. Each teaching shift brings excitement and apprehension as I transition into my new role as a junior faculty member and bear the responsibility of postgraduate training. Through trial and error over the past several weeks, I have found four specific behaviors that help me be a better educator. I implement these steps each shift and find them to be quite effective. Give them a try and modify to a version that works for you.

“Goal setting helps increase motivation, guide focus and direction, and increase productivity.”

1. Explain your workflow to the resident and describe how they best fit into it.

From the time we start as interns, EM physicians spend countless hours mastering our workflow. Should we see a new patient? Follow-up on labs? Re-evaluate an existing patient? Spend 30 seconds to fill in part of a patient’s chart? We try, try, and try again until we find the right formula that gets us through a busy shift with maximum efficiency. Suddenly, there’s an added

“A little insight on how you navigate your own tasks during a shift will help you maintain your efficiency, but also serve as a template for the resident to design his or her own method.”

piece to the puzzle: a resident. The easiest way to incorporate this new “puzzle piece” is to explain how you operate. I take this a step further and describe specific actions the resident can take to minimize interruptions. A little insight on how you navigate your own tasks during a shift will help you maintain your efficiency, but also serve as a template for the resident to design his or her own method.

2. Set SMART goals

At the beginning of your shift, ask residents if they have any goals they are working towards; if they don’t, help them create one or two SMART (specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, timebound) goals. These can be goals for the current shift or near future but should be tangible. Goal setting helps increase motivation, guide focus and direction, and increase productivity. I find that goal setting also leads to residents having a higher sense of work satisfaction, which can help combat burnout.

3. Outline communication expectations for the shift

Effective communication is hard work. Exchanging information and balancing communication styles in a high stress environment like the emergency department is even harder. Make life easier for yourself and your learner by setting some ground rules. Personally, I share how I like to be addressed (by title when interacting with patients and by first name otherwise). This removes any ambiguity and creates a sense of collegiality. I also share my most important rule: it’s okay to say, “I don’t know,” but never be dishonest. I find this statement establishes trust by creating a safe learning environment.

4. Provide digestible educational content

Our short-term memory can hold only five to nine pieces of information at a time; when you’re busy and tired, it’s probably even less than that. Residents are juggling so much more than just learning how to practice medicine. Their neurons are occupied with recalling patient histories, putting together facts to present to consultants, and remembering responsibilities outside their roles as residents. So, provide them with casebased, bite-sized pearls that exploit the benefit of association. For bonus points, direct your resident to a resource on the topic that they can review later.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Dr. Muhamed is a junior faculty member for the emergency medicine residency program at Northeast Georgia Medical Center, Gainesville, Georgia.