Evaluating the impact of emergency medicine education on medical interns' knowledge scores.

BACKGROUND

Emergency medicine is a young specialty in Iran. Since 2005, a 4-week rotation has been allocated to emergency medicine instruction for all medical interns during their medical internship in Tehran University of Medical Sciences.

OBJECTIVE

In this study, we have evaluated the impact of emergency medicine rotation on medical interns' knowledge in the field of emergency medicine.

METHODS

From October 2005 to May 2006, 10 medical interns of emergency medicine rotation were randomly enrolled in this study each month. They were administered a pretest assessing their emergency medicine knowledge. Then, they attended a theoretical and practical course. Finally, they were reassessed by a post-test similar to the pretest.

RESULTS

There were 98 medical interns, including 53 male (54.08%) and 45 female (45.91%) participants. The mean of participants' age was 25.50 (±1.47) years. Their internship duration spanned from 1 to 18 months, with a mean of 5.40 (±4.71) months. The difference between participants' pretest and post-test scores was statistically significant (P<0.0001). There was no significant difference between pretest and post-test scores within male (P=0.856) and female (P=0.973) participants. There was a significant inverse correlation between participants' age and their pretest scores (P=0.017). But there was no significant correlation between participants' age and the difference between pretest and post-test scores (P=0.307).

CONCLUSION

It seems that emergency medicine rotation improves the medical interns' knowledge in the field of emergency medicine; and their sex, passed medical blocks and the duration of internship do not affect this knowledge.