Do End-of-Rotation and End-of-Shift Assessments Inform Clinical Competency Committees’ (CCC) Decisions?

Introduction Clinical Competency Committees (CCC) require reliable, objective data to inform decisions regarding assignment of milestone proficiency levels, which must be reported to the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education. After the development of two new assessment methods, the end-of-shift (EOS) assessment and the end-of-rotation (EOR) assessment, we sought to evaluate their performance. We report data on the concordance between these assessments, as well as how each informs the final proficiency level determined in biannual CCC meetings. We hypothesized that there would be a high concordance level between the two assessment methods, including concordance of both the EOS and EOR with the final proficiency level designation by the CCC. Methods The residency program is an urban academic four-year emergency medicine residency with 48 residents. After their shifts in the emergency department (ED), residents handed out EOS assessment forms asking about individual milestones from 15 subcompetencies to supervising physicians, as well as triggered electronic EOR-doctor (EORd) assessments to supervising doctors and EOR-nurse (EORn) to nurses they had worked with after each two-week ED block. EORd assessments contained the full proficiency level scale from 16 subcompetencies, while EORn assessments contained four subcompetencies. Data reports were generated after each six-month assessment period and data was aggregated. We calculated Spearman's rank order correlations for correlations between assessment types and between assessments and final CCC proficiency levels. Results Over 24 months, 5,234 assessments were completed. The strongest correlations with CCC proficiency levels were the EORd for the immediate six-month assessment period prior (rs 0.71-0.84), and the CCC proficiency levels from the previous six-months (rs 0.83-0.92). EOS assessments had weaker correlations (rs 0.49 to 0.62), as did EORn (rs 0.4 to 0.73). Conclusion End-of-rotation assessments completed by supervising doctors are most highly correlated with final CCC proficiency level designations, while end-of-shift assessments and end-of-rotation assessments by nurses did not correlate strongly with final CCC proficiency levels, both with overestimation of levels noted. Every level of proficiency the CCC assigned appears to be highly correlated with the designated level in the immediate six-month period, perhaps implying CCC members are biased by previous level assignments.