Sources of information used by emergency medicine residents

Leaders in academic emergency medicine have been among the more vocal proponents of evidence based medicine. They have also been strong advocates for the use of social media as learning resources. So this survey on how EM residents search for information was interesting:

Outcomes: Of the 401 residents who received the e-mailed survey, 226 (56.3%) completed it. Of these, 97.7% reported spending at least one hour per week engaging in extracurricular education, and 34.5% reported spending two to four hours per week (P less than .001). Time listening to podcasts was the most popular (reported by 35.0% of residents), followed by reading textbooks (33.6%) and searching Google (21.4%; P less than .001). Residents endorsed podcasts as the most beneficial (endorsed by 70.3%) compared with textbooks (endorsed by 54.3%), journals (36.5%), and Google (33.8%; P less than .001). Most respondents reported evaluating the quality of evidence or reviewing references “rarely” or less than half the time. A majority (80.0%) selected the topics they accessed based on recent clinical encounters.

Next Steps: The results suggest that residents are using more open access interactive multimedia tools. Medical educators must engage with current learners to guide appropriate use of these.

It's interesting how trends in the real world, even the academic real world, differ from the “official” positions on EBM in which these types of resources are discouraged.