Evaluating the impact of emergency medicine education on medical interns' knowledge scores.

BACKGROUND: Emergency medicine is a young specialty in Iran. Since 2005, a 4-week rotation has been allocated to emergency medicine instruction for all medical interns during their medical internship in Tehran University of Medical Sciences.

OBJECTIVE: In this study, we have evaluated the impact of emergency medicine rotation on medical interns' knowledge in the field of emergency medicine.

METHODS: From October 2005 to May 2006, 10 medical interns of emergency medicine rotation were randomly enrolled in this study each month. They were administered a pretest assessing their emergency medicine knowledge. Then, they attended a theoretical and practical course. Finally, they were reassessed by a post-test similar to the pretest.

RESULTS: There were 98 medical interns, including 53 male (54.08%) and 45 female (45.91%) participants. The mean of participants' age was 25.50 (±1.47) years. Their internship duration spanned from 1 to 18 months, with a mean of 5.40 (±4.71) months. The difference between participants' pretest and post-test scores was statistically significant (P<0.0001). There was no significant difference between pretest and post-test scores within male (P=0.856) and female (P=0.973) participants. There was a significant inverse correlation between participants' age and their pretest scores (P=0.017). But there was no significant correlation between participants' age and the difference between pretest and post-test scores (P=0.307).

CONCLUSION: It seems that emergency medicine rotation improves the medical interns' knowledge in the field of emergency medicine; and their sex, passed medical blocks and the duration of internship do not affect this knowledge.