Emergency medicine residents' perspectives on injury prevention.

STUDY OBJECTIVE

To determine emergency medicine residents' perspectives and opinions concerning the relevance of injury prevention to emergency medicine and their exposure to formal instruction and readings in this subspecialty area.

METHODS

A survey was mailed between November 1992 and February 1993 to all 461 residents and 1992 graduates of the 13 emergency medicine residency programs in California.

RESULTS

Three hundred ninety questionnaires (85%) were returned. Ninety-seven percent of respondents said they believed injury prevention is pertinent to emergency medicine. Sixty-two percent said they believed inadequate time in residency is devoted to this subject, and 70% said there should be a greater focus on injury prevention in their training. Only 44% of the respondents said they had received lectures and 28% of the respondents said they consistently read journal articles on injury prevention. There were no statistically significant differences between the level of the respondents' training and their answers to the questions.

CONCLUSION

Although most emergency medicine residents consider injury prevention pertinent to emergency medicine and important to their training, most perceived a lack of formal instruction on injury prevention during their training and did not consistently read articles on this subspecialty area.