'Nightmares–Family Medicine' Course Is an Effective Acute Care Teaching Tool for Family Medicine Residents

INTRODUCTION Simulation is an effective method for teaching acute care skills but has not been comprehensively evaluated with family medicine (FM) residents. We developed a comprehensive simulation-based approach for teaching acute care skills to FM residents and assessed it for effectiveness. METHOD We compared the effectiveness of our standard acute care simulation training [Acute Care Rounds (ACR)] to a more comprehensive simulation-based acute care program, Nightmares-Family Medicine (NM). We used a self-reported comfort scale as well as video-captured performance on an acute care Objective Structured Clinical Examination (OSCE). Seventy-seven of our FM residents in their postgraduate year 1 between July 2012 and June 2015 participated in the study. Wilcoxon matched pairs and one-tailed t tests analysis was used for analyzing the comfort scale, Whitney-Mann, and χ for the OSCE performance. RESULTS Nightmares-Family Medicine's initial 2-day session significantly improved the resident's self-assessment scores on all 20 items of the questionnaire (P < 0.05). Time-matched ACR improved 11 of 20 items (P < 0.05) level. Follow-up NM sessions improved 5 to 8 of 20 items (P < 0.05). Follow-up ACR sessions improved 1 to 5 of 20 items (P < 0.05). The means taken at the end of postgraduate year 1 year were higher for 13 of 20 items in the NM group (P < 0.05) as compared with ACR group. The NM group scored significantly higher on both the mean scores of OSCE individual categories (P < 0.01) and the Global Assessment Score (P < 0.05). Significantly less NM residents failed the OSCE (n = 1/30, 3.3% vs n = 8/37, 21.6%, P < 0.05). CONCLUSIONS "Nightmares-Family Medicine" course is very effective at teaching acute care skills to FM residents and more so than our previous curriculum.