The Quality of Written Feedback by Attendings of Internal Medicine Residents

Abstract

BACKGROUND: Attending evaluations are commonly used to evaluate residents. OBJECTIVES: Evaluate the quality of written feedback of internal medicine residents. DESIGN: Retrospective. PARTICIPANTS: Internal medicine residents and faculty at the Medical College of Wisconsin from 2004 to 2012. MAIN MEASURES: From monthly evaluations of residents by attendings, a randomly selected sample of 500 written comments by attendings were qualitatively coded and rated as high-, moderate-, or low-quality feedback by two independent coders with good inter-rater reliability (kappa: 0.94). Small group exercises with residents and attendings also coded the utterances as high, moderate, or low quality and developed criteria for this categorization. In-service examination scores were correlated with written feedback. KEY RESULTS: There were 228 internal medicine residents who had 6,603 evaluations by 334 attendings. Among 500 randomly selected written comments, there were 2,056 unique utterances: 29 % were coded as nonspecific statements, 20 % were comments about resident personality, 16 % about patient care, 14 % interpersonal communication, 7 % medical knowledge, 6 % professionalism, and 4 % each on practice-based learning and systems-based practice. Based on criteria developed by group exercises, the majority of written comments were rated as moderate quality (65 %); 22 % were rated as high quality and 13 % as low quality. Attendings who provided high-quality feedback rated residents significantly lower in all six of the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education (ACGME) competencies (p <0.0005 for all), and had a greater range of scores. Negative comments on medical knowledge were associated with lower in-service examination scores. CONCLUSIONS: Most attending written evaluation was of moderate or low quality. Attendings who provided high-quality feedback appeared to be more discriminating, providing significantly lower ratings of residents in all six ACGME core competencies, and across a greater range. Attendings’ negative written comments on medical knowledge correlated with lower in-service training scores.