Expectations by PGY year

PGY 1: Identify projects

This year is spent mostly building basic emergency medicine knowledge base, studying for step 3, and adjusting to life as a resident. As you get your bearings, ask around from your senior residents and faculty about projects that they've been involved in. Take a look at the faculty academic interests list and at some of the current ongoing projects. 

Be sure to complete your CITI and IRBNet trainings as these will greatly facilitate hopping on an existing project and fulfilling your QI/SA requirements!

PGY 2: Commit to a project and start work

This is a year of continued growth and when most residents start to feel like "real doctors". As you begin to take on more responsibilities clinically, you hopefully broaden your horizons to the workings of the medical system behind the scenes, the role of the ED in the context of the broader medical system, and consequently, our role as ED physicians in that system. This should help frame your QI experience as your own contribution to the greater task at hand. 

*It is expected that you will start preliminary work on your QI project, or begin contributing to pre-existing QI projects already ongoing in the department.

This is also a year of growth in medical knowledge, where you will hopefully start to interrogate the sources of long-held facts you have learned in medical school and want to delve beyond the generalities of the textbook. As you do, you will likely find significant gaps in what is actually known. Hopefully this will inspire you to pursue either refutal or confirmation with either further clinical study or a compilation of existing studies in a literature review or a meta-analysis.

*It is expected that you will start work on an academic project during this year. 

PGY 3: Completion or significant advancement of QI/SA projects

This is the year when residents begin to transition towards independent practice and towards life after residency. This is the most exciting and sometimes the most existentially nerve-racking. To avoid unnecessary extra stress it is imperative that you plan ahead (including scheduling electives) so that you are able to complete the necessary QI and SA requirements in order to graduate. 

This is the year when you should be getting comfortable working clinically and taking on leadership roles on shift and off shift. The beginning of the year is usually the ideal time to complete the bulk of the outstanding QI and SA work if not yet completed in second year. 

Case reports: a word of caution

Please do not wait in the hopes of chancing upon an interesting case or exam finding that may be used for the purposes of a case report. While case reports are a minor but important component of our collective knowledge, we strongly discourage our residents from relying on them to complete the scholarly activity requirement. And while we are building our research infrastructure to support a sustainable case report repository, in the meantime residents are strongly encouraged to find more reliable and more impactful projects.