ST. PAUL, MN – Responding to feedback that existing resident assessments were not properly evaluating the attendings of tomorrow in how they adapt to important trends in medicine, the University of Minnesota Emergency Medicine (EM) Residency Program has turned to a source that they say encounters more “day-to-day patient-centered contact” with residents than anyone else in the medical field: Emergency Department (ED) frequent fliers.

em entranceThe plan, according to residency director, Dr. D. Lightful, is to hire these “health care connoisseurs” to fill out formal evaluations of the EM residents in exchange for relief from having to pay back a portion of their medical debts.

“We aren’t at bedside when our residents do their H&Ps and discuss the assessment and plan,” explained Lightful.  “Overall, we rarely get to see hands-on how our trainees truly interact with our patients, especially when we’re in the room for such a small portion of the resident-patient encounter, if at all.  This is a huge hole in our evaluation process.  There is only one group of people who have repeatedly clinically encountered all of our residents and can expertly compare them to one another, and that’s our ED frequent fliers.”

“We also need to acknowledge that the overall trend in medicine is towards optimizing patient satisfaction, more so than providing exceptional clinical care,” he continued.  “What better way to evaluate a resident’s ability to garner high patient satisfaction scores than by collecting feedback from the patients themselves!  Press Ganey and other patient satisfaction metrics must be applied to resident evaluations, like they are applied to attending evaluations, to alert our trainees’ prospective employers that they are capable of navigating the real-world obstacles involved in practicing medicine in the United States.”

Overall, patients are enthusiastic about the proposal.  Frequent ED visitor for chronic back pain, Ms. Constance Dolor, 32, opined, “I thought that last resident did a great job explaining why I shouldn’t get my Dilaudid, but he just didn’t have that ‘likability factor’ like the guy yesterday who gave me 3 shots of Dilaudid and a script for 20 Percs.  Today’s resident gets a 2 out of 5.”

Milli of Dilli
After picking up the basics of medicine by watching TV shows, I moved to LA, forged a medical school diploma, and somehow found some success in the late 80’s as an event physician for major Hollywood events. However, it all came crashing down while working the 1990 Grammy awards. While “Girl You Know it’s True” was being played live, a stagehand went into cardiac arrest and I was called upon to help. Unfortunately, as I tried to lip-sync CPR instructions, the speaker on my cassette player stopped working and I was exposed for a fraud. After serving time in prison, I went to medical school and residency and I finished training to become an Emergency Medicine physician. Instead of using this training and knowledge for good, I decided to abuse it to become a professional drug seeker. Armed with advanced medical knowledge, my quest remains to go from ED to ED searching out the drug seeker’s Holy Grail: syringes filled with 1mg of hydromorphone, the so-called “Milli of Dilli.” While I am not drug seeking, I have decided to write medical satire posing as a typical First World emergency physician. My website, with my other satirical articles that did not make it into Gomerblog, can be found at http://www.firstworldem.com and my twitter handle is @firstworldem