The feasibility and effectiveness of a pilot resident-organized and -led knowledge base review.

OBJECTIVE: The Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education (ACGME) requires a sufficient medical knowledge base as one of the six core competencies in residency training. The authors judged that an annual "short-course" review of medical knowledge would be a useful adjunct to standard seminar and rotation teaching, and that a resident-designed course might more closely meet resident-identified needs and learning styles.

METHODS: Our residency training program designed a formal summer short-course, called the Knowledge Base Review (KBR), with the hypothesis that the course would improve general knowledge as measured by the Psychiatry Resident-in-Training Examination (PRITE) and with the objective that this program would enrich the residents' general knowledge base in psychiatry and neurology. The authors designed the KBR as a weekly curriculum composed of nine 2-hour sessions, each equally didactic- and active learning-based. The first hour spotlighted one of the subscales of the PRITE. The second hour used a question and answer test in which four teams of residents competed to answer in game show style. Qualitative and quantitative assessment of the KBR was conducted.

RESULTS: Attendance among the PGY-2, -3, and -4 classes was 82%, 73%, and 94%, respectively. Participating residents completed a survey midway through the KBR. Ninety-five percent responded that the course was meeting their own expectations "all" and "most of the time," 100% responded that the didactic component was useful, and 94% felt that the game show component was useful. Among 23 residents who took the PRITE in the year prior to and the year after the KBR, there was a 2.6% increase in PRITE global psychiatry scores (p=0.15) in contrast to a 9.0% decline in global neurology scores (p=0.001), which was not addressed in the KBR.

CONCLUSION: The broad participation and acceptability of the course and the performance difference in PRITE scores between the psychiatry topics, the majority of which were reviewed, and neurology, which was not reviewed, suggest the potential for such a resident-organized and -led intervention to impact acquisition of medical knowledge through an enjoyable and effective approach.