Role and structure of morning report in children’s teaching hospitals in Iran

Background: Morning report is an integral component of medical training programs. It is conducted as "evidence based" or "problem based". It takes an efficient time of all members of the medical team in teaching hospitals, it seems necessary to evaluate its role in the education. Because of the importance of morning report in education, we evaluated the current and ideal conditions of morning report according to the opinions of medical teams in teaching children’s hospitals. Methods: A crosssectional descriptive study conducted in three children’s teaching hospitals in Tehran in 2005. The opinion and perception of 358 participants, including faculties, residents, fellows, interns, and medical students, were collected by a questionnaire regarding the importance and structure of morning report. The data were presented as frequency and percentage. Results: 78% of respondents expected a high educational role for morning report. Although 317(88.54%) had a regular attendance in morning report, only 34.1% were satisfied from current condition. The majority believed that faculty had better to lead the sessions, and voted for case presentation to be selected by senior resident on call, despite the prominent current leadership of the faculty. Most of the participants (88.6%) preferred complicated and unusual cases for presentation. Current morning reports predominantly based on the presentation of the interesting or complicated cases were admitted on the previous day. A few number of cases were reintroduced after achieving the final diagnosis. In addition out-patients and those under observation in emergency room were usually ignored in the meetings. Conclusion: Regarding the educational role of morning report, there is a far distance between the present and ideal condition. Unattractiveness of presentations and poor participation in discussion might have negative impact on achieving the goals.