SAEMF ARMED Med Ed Pilot Grant - $25,000

"Motivations and Barriers of Emergency Physicians Maintaining Procedure Skills"

Emergency medicine (EM) physicians must maintain their procedural skills to ensure high-quality patient care. Simulation-based learning has an important role to support EM skills maintenance because it allows for safe practice of less common procedures, formative feedback, and performance assessment. However, there is a gap in understanding how social, cultural, and other workplace factors unique to the EM environment influence motivation or create challenges to engage in simulation-based skills maintenance activities. Without a more nuanced and contextual understanding of the driving forces and challenges related to procedure skills maintenance, simulation-based programs will be limited in their effectiveness.

This project will advance the scientific field by bridging the gap between EMphysicianskill maintenance education and the motivations and challenges experienced by EM physicians. This work is expected to enhance physician maintenance of competence and, indirectly, patient safety through both a deeper, context-specific understanding of the skills maintenance processand a set of education best practices.

Recipient(s)

  • Nicholas Pokrajac, MD

    Nicholas Pokrajac, MD

    Stanford University

    "Motivations and Barriers of Emergency Physicians Maintaining Procedure Skills"

    Nicholas Pokrajac, MD, is a clinical associate professor of emergency medicine and pediatrics in the Department of Emergency Medicine at Stanford University. After obtaining his medical degree from the Keck School of Medicine of the University of Southern California and completed a residency in emergency medicine and fellowship in pediatric emergency medicine at the University of California San Diego. Dr. Pokrajac currently serves as the director of clinical skills training in his current position at Stanford. His interests are in faculty clinical skills maintenance and development, and the use of simulation-based mastery learning for teaching faculty.