A National Survey of Turkish Emergency Residents’ Perspectives Regarding Rotation Effectiveness

Objectives: Our purpose in this study is investigating the opinions of the emergency medicine proficiency students about the rotational programs that are implemented in the emergency clinics in our country.Methods: Conducting a survey to comprise of all the emergency medicine proficiency students working in the medical faculties providing emergency medicine training and the research and educational training hospitals had been planned to be implemented between June 2011 and October 2011. In order to determine the contribution of the rotations to medical education, a visual analogous scale had been used whereas closed-end questions had been used in order to determine the number of attempts made during the rotations and open-end questions had been implemented in order to determine the insufficiencies in rotation. Results: In our study, 218 (45.4%) students working in the research and educational training hospitals and 262 (54.6%) students from the faculties of medicine had been used. 480 students had been used in total. 331 (68.9%) of the students were male and were in the average age between 31.2±4.4. The emergency medicine proficiency students had defined the contribution of the rotational programs to their education as 4.51±2.42 in the visual analogous scale and the adequacy of the length of the rotations as 5.92±2.80. The rotations which contributed at most to the students educational purposes are the pulmonary diseases, (5.39±2.82), the cardiology (5.18±2.95), and the neurology (4.75±2.78) rotations, respectively. The additional rotational programs demanded by the emergency medicine students are the international emergency medicine clinics (50.5%), national emergency medicine clinics (17.2%), in thoracic surgery (13.2%), in 112 Emergency Services (9.3%) and the Ear Nose and Throat Rotations (6.3%). 50.9% of the participants share the opinion that the efficacy of the rotations should be supervised better. Conclusions: The proficiency students studying in the field of emergency medicine have the opinion that the contribution of the rotations to their education is low and that the rotations are not supervised enough.