Chief Resident Skills: A Study on Resident Perceptions of Skill Importance and Confidence

CONTEXT: Chief residents (CRs) generally play a pivotal role in the graduate medical education mission to facilitate the professional development of resident physicians. Courses designed to prepare CRs for their new role previously have primarily focused on developing their teaching, evaluation and interpersonal communication skills. What remains unclear is how different types of residents (CRs versus Non-CRs and men versus women) may vary in their perception of how important particular skills are, and their confidence in performing these same skills. The purpose of this cross-sectional descriptive correlational study was to investigate the potential differences in sample respondents’ perceived importance of CR skills and respondents’ perceived confidence to perform these skills. METHODS: The authors administered a 28-item survey questionnaire to a population of 457 CR and Non-CR respondents from 20 clinical specialties regarding their perceived importance of 11 skills, as well as their self-assessed confidence in performing each skill. This study also sought to examine whether gender-based differences existed for the perceived importance and confidence of these same CR skills. RESULTS: Statistically significant differences in perceived importance and confidence levels between sample subgroups for the majority of key CR skills were observed. When asked about importance of CR skills, both CR and Non-CR respondents identified administrative and time management skills as most important, contrary to the other types of skills (e.g., teaching skills) the authors had generally expected to be most highly rated. As expected, the largest overall gap in perceived importance and self-reported confidence as either a CR or Non-CR was in the area of conflict management. Males reported higher confidence than females in each of the CR skills, with differences for five items found to be statistically significant. (p < 0.05) CR respondents also reported higher confidence in performing 10 of 11 skills at statistically significant levels. (p < 0.05) CONCLUSIONS: Although this project contributes baseline data from a relatively large sample, further studies are still required to replicate these results in other resident populations to further examine the perceptions of contemporary resident physicians concerning this vital role.