Key points are not available for this paper at this time.
PURPOSE: To evaluate the impact of academic hospitalists on third-year medical students during inpatient medicine rotations. METHOD: The authors conducted a retrospective quantitative assessment of medical student evaluations of hospitalist and nonhospitalist Department of Medicine faculty at Oregon Health 100 with hospitalists, and 38 with nonhospitalists. Of these students, 99 (71.7%) returned evaluations. The hospitalists received higher numeric evaluations for all individual attending characteristics. Significance was achieved comparing communication of goals (p =.011), effectiveness as a clinical teacher (p =.016), and for the combined analysis of all parameters (p <.001). Despite lack of achieving statistical significance, there was a trend toward hospitalists being more likely to contribute to the medical student's perception of growth and development during the period evaluated (p =.065). CONCLUSIONS: In addition to performing the responsibilities required of full-time hospital-based physicians, hospitalists were able to provide at least as positive an educational experience as did highly rated nonhospitalist teaching faculty and in some areas performed better. A hospitalist model can be an effective method of delivering inpatient education to medical students.
Hunter et al. (Thu,) studied this question.