Curated Collections for Clinician Educators: Five Key Papers on Graduated Responsibility in Residency Education

Introduction The Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education calls graduated responsibility “one of the core tenets of American graduate medical education.” However, there is no clear set of resources for programs to implement a system of progressively increasing responsibilities for trainees. This project aimed to identify a set of high-yield papers on graduated responsibility for junior faculty members. Methods A study group of Academic Life in Emergency Medicine Faculty Incubator participants identified relevant literature on graduated responsibility via a comprehensive literature search and a call to the online medical education community; 59 total papers were identified. The most relevant and applicable were selected by the study group via a three-round modified Delphi process. Results Five key articles for junior faculty interested in implementing more robust graduated responsibility at their residency training program were selected and described here. Summaries of key points, along with considerations for faculty developers and relevance to junior faculty, are presented for each article. Conclusions The articles presented here provide a solid theoretical and practical basis for junior faculty to explore graduated responsibility. The five articles presented here provide the junior faculty with a toolkit to examine and improve their systems for assigning responsibilities in a graded fashion at their own institutions.