Emergency Medicine Milestones Final Ratings Are Often Subpar.

Background: The emergency medicine (EM) milestones are objective behaviors that are categorized into thematic domains called "subcompetencies" (eg, emergency stabilization). The scale for rating milestones is predicated on the assumption that a rating (level) of 1.0 corresponds to an incoming EM-1 resident and a rating of 4.0 is the "target rating" (albeit not an expectation) for a graduating resident. Our aim in this study was to determine the frequency with which graduating residents received the target milestone ratings.

Methods: This retrospective, cross-sectional study was a secondary analysis of a dataset used in a prior study but was not reported previously. We analyzed milestone subcompetency ratings from April 25-June 24, 2022 for categorical EM residents in their final year of training. Ratings were dichotomized as meeting the expected level at the time of program completion (ratings of ≥3.5) and not meeting the expected level at the time of program completion (ratings of ≤3.0). We calculated the number of residents who did not achieve target ratings for each of the subcompetencies.

Results: In Spring 2022, of the 2,637 residents in the spring of their last year of training, 1,613 (61.2%) achieved a rating of ≥3.5 on every subcompetency and 1,024 (38.8%) failed to achieve that rating on at least one subcompetency. There were 250 residents (9.5%) who failed to achieve half of their expected subcompetency ratings and 105 (4.0%) who failed to achieve the expected rating (ie, rating was ≤3.0) on every subcompetency.

Conclusion: When using an EM milestone rating threshold of 3.5, only 61.2% of physicians achieved the target ratings for program graduation; 4.0% of physicians failed to achieve target ratings for any milestone subcompetency; and 9.5% of physicians failed to achieve the target ratings for graduating residents in half of the subcompetencies.