Temple
Emergency Medicine
Clinical Curriculum
Each year consists of 13 separate four-week rotations. Central to the curriculum is the expectation to provide comprehensive training in the areas fundamental to the specialty of emergency medicine. Furthermore, emergency medicine residents will develop an understanding and awareness of the major disciplines with which the emergency medicine specialist must interface. The components of the experiential curriculum are listed below.
Included in the resident vacation time of three weeks, is a one-week "holiday block". Residents chose between Christmas (typically 12/21-12/27) or New Years (12/28-1/4).
01
Fundamentals
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Emergency Medicine - TUH 26 weeks
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Pediatric Emergency Medicine - CHOP 4 weeks
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Pediatric ICU - St.Chris 4 weeks
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Trauma - 4 weeks
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Medical ICU - 4 weeks
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Anesthesia - 4 weeks
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Ultrasound - 4 weeks
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Obstetrics/EMS - 4 weeks
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Vacation - 3 weeks
02
Efficiency
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Emergency Medicine - TUH 14 weeks
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Emergency Medicine - Episcopal 4 weeks
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Emergency Medicine - Jeanes 8 weeks
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Pediatric Emergency Medicine - CHOP 4 weeks
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Surgical ICU - 4 weeks
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Toxicology/Addiction Medicine - 4 weeks
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Trauma 4 weeks
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Burn ICU 4 weeks
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Elective - 3 weeks
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Vacation - 4 weeks
03
Leadership
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Emergency Medicine - TUH 21 weeks
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Emergency Medicine - Episcopal 8 weeks
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Emergency Medicine - Jeanes 4 weeks
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Pediatric Emergency Medicine - CHOP 4 weeks
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Medical ICU 4 weeks
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Administration - 4 weeks
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Elective - 3 weeks
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Vacation - 4 weeks
Didactics
The core content of Emergency Medicine as outlined by the American Board of Emergency Medicine (18 topics) will be covered twice over the residents’ 3 years of training. Most didactic presentations will take place during the Emergency Medicine Conference Series held Thursday mornings from 8:00am to 12:00 pm. Each month has a designated system theme, and corresponding suggested reading.
Each month, senior resident and faculty leaders take turns leading 2 hour Active Learning Sessions (ALS). Under this “flipped classroom” model, EM residents prepare by listening to podcasts, watching archived multimedia presentations from major meetings, or brand new material recorded by their faculty and peers. Then they come to the session and participate in case discussions, role-play, debates and other hands-on activities. Residents receive credit for the dedicated time they spend on the preparation, which we call asynchronous learning.
Other components of the monthly schedule are designed to cover core content, as well as new areas of interest, emerging research or controversies. Temple EM faculty and visiting speakers provide 40 minute lectures, with part of the time spent covering high yield facts of diagnosis and mangement, and the rest on an area of expertise. Temple interns prepare short, high yield talks as part of the “Number Needed to Treat (NNT)” series. Second years present a follow up case that corresponds to an area of academic interest, as part of the Content Expert Program. Senior residents lead the ALS and also the Morbidity & Mortality series.
Journal Club
Journal Club is held once a month, usually on a Tuesday night. Four articles are presented and discussed by the group, with the purpose of keeping up with the current EM literature and learning how to critically read medical publications. Check out our blog for short synopses of previously reviewed articles.
Journal Club is “protected time,” meaning that attending physicians cover the emergency department and all of the residents are free to participate. We take advantage of this time to get out of the hospital, and hold this event at a different location each month–prior locations have included restaurants, bars, outdoor picnics, bonfires and the homes of faculty and residents.
Journal Club is followed by “Residents’ Night Out,” which is protected time for the residents to get together and do something fun outside of the clinical setting. Residents’ Night Out has included going to a haunted prison, dragon-boating on the Schuylkill River, karaoke, among many other activities.
Content Expert
In 2015, Temple’s Department of Emergency Medicine introduced the Content Expert Program (CEP). Each resident is paired with faculty advisors to develop expertise in an assigned core clinical Content Area. Each resident Content Expert will critically appraise the latest literature in his/her area and will make recommendations to update our departmental guidelines to ensure best practices. A required performance improvement project will teach performance improvement methodology and may result in opportunities to publish findings as abstracts, posters or peer-reviewed articles.