Do senior medical students meet recommended emergency medicine curricula requirements?

BACKGROUND: Emergency departments (EDs) offer a variety of learning opportunities for undergraduate medical students. It is however, difficult to evaluate whether they are receiving recommended training during their emergency medicine (EM) clerkship without identifying their clinical activities. We aimed to evaluate the clinical exposure of the final year medical students at our College during their EM clerkship. METHODS: This is a retrospective analysis of prospectively collected student logbooks. 75 students rotated in a 4-week EM clerkship during 2015–2016. The students rotated in EDs of two hospitals. Each ED treats more than 120,000 cases annually. The students completed 12 eight-hours shifts. Presentations and procedures seen were compared with EM curriculum recommendations. RESULTS: Five thousand one hundred twenty-two patient presentations and 3246 procedures were recorded in the logbooks, an average (SD) of 68.3 (17.6) patients and 46.1 (14.0) procedures. None of the students encountered all ten recommended presentations. Two students (2.6%) logged all nine procedure categories of the EM curriculum. CONCLUSION: Recommended presentations and procedures of the EM clerkship were not fully encountered by all our students. Different settings vary in the availability and type of patients and procedures. Each clinical clerkship should tailor their teaching methods based on the available learning opportunities. ELECTRONIC SUPPLEMENTARY MATERIAL: The online version of this article (10.1186/s12909-017-1110-1) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.