GroundED in EM

With new third-year medical students eager to get their first exposure in the Emergency Department (ED) on their upcoming clerkship and with safety concerns during the current pandemic making teaching Emergency Medicine (EM) challenging, the need for continuing medical education and producing competent physicians continues unfazed. With institutions struggling to protect their students from illness exposure without compromising their education, there has been a void to fill to safely teach EM. 

To this end, content experts from Academic Life in Emergency Medicine (ALiEM) have worked tirelessly to produce a completely virtual asynchronous clerkship rotation, targeted at undifferentiated third-year medical students. Our goal with this curriculum is to provide a platform that would allow medical students to develop a strong foundation in EM, without any previous exposure to the field. While this does not replace clinical time at the bedside, it does provide a solid framework on how to approach undifferentiated patients within the ED, understanding the inner workings of EM, as well as developing medical decision-making skills. GroundED in EM is a four-week long online curriculum that is centered around the six core competencies endorsed by ACGME, utilizing videos, blogs, podcasts and choose-your-own-adventure style cases. Learner successful completion of proposed learning objectives is assessed with multiple choices questions focusing on material covered, awarding them certification of successful completion of the curriculum. We hope that by completing this clerkship rotation, learners will be pushed to further develop their medical decision skills in a way that can be easily translated to the bedside when they are able to return to full patient care capacity.