Residency Program Curriculum

The didactic curriculum includes a four-and-a-half-hour resident conference each Wednesday morning. Residents are expected to come to conferences each week and are relieved from clinical duties on most outside rotations so they can attend. Breakfast is provided at scheduled resident conferences.

The curriculum covers wellness, core diagnosis and management topics, critical case conferences, weekly reading assignments, radiology rounds, ECG conferences and morbidity and mortality conferences. Our monthly Journal Club is held at our academic offices for resident convenience or at faculty/resident homes, lending a family feeling to the residency.

Each resident’s critical case, procedure and resuscitation experiences are closely monitored to ensure proper breadth and depth of training. EMS education includes ground ambulance ride-alongs with the busiest paramedic units in the county and the opportunity to gain experience in transporting critically ill patients by Mercy Air helicopter. Combined monthly simulation/ultrasound conferences include hands-on training in various emergency medicine procedures, as well as high-fidelity simulation of real patient cases that are tailored in complexity to the corresponding year of resident training.

By the end of the program, our residents have earned certifications in ACLS, PALS and ATLS. Many residents also gain instructor status for these courses, although this is not a requirement.

Block Rotations

Block rotations offer residents focused, in-depth training in specific areas of emergency medicine over set periods.

View a Sample Block Diagram

Innovative Teaching Modalities

Over the last five years, the faculty members of UCI’s Emergency Medicine Residency program have incorporated a variety of innovative teaching modalities to engage and educate their residents and medical students. Ten percent of the curriculum is asynchronous; residents watch online lectures, take quizzes and read important articles at their own pace. During in-person didactics, the curriculum incorporates both medical knowledge and teamwork.

A consistent theme in many of these modalities is a friendly sense of educational competition. Residents can earn badges, which are displayed prominently on a leaderboard, in a number of ways: for example, winning competitions, publishing an article or taking on a leadership position. Winners of the trivia-style weekly reading Kahoot! quizzes earn badges as well. In a more hands-on approach, residents can also earn a badge by doing well in a simulation competition (akin to Society for Academic Emergency Medicine’s SimWars), where they run through clinical cases or participate in splinting, CPR and intubation competitions. During scavenger hunts and escape rooms, residents answer emergency medicine-related questions to solve puzzles or obtain the next clue.

Other fun learning modalities include:

• Sonolympics, a combination of point-of-care ultrasound contests and trivia.
• The Wilderness Games with Dr. Katzer, which is held annually at San Onofre and challenges residents on a series of wilderness-based EM cases.
• The Clinical Pathologic Case (CPC) competition (akin to Council for Residency Director’s CPC competition), during which junior residents challenge the senior residents to “solve” difficult cases. The residents are scored on their clinical reasoning and presentation style.

Case-based and team-based learning are also used in place of standard lectures. When a traditional lecture is given, a concerted effort is made to create a shorter, higher-impact and more hands-on lecture format for the residents. It is also a priority to expose residents to the clinical experience and opinions of physicians from other specialties and emergency medicine physicians outside of UCI. Multispecialty panels and panels made up of EM physicians from various private hospitals help residents learn how cases are managed by different specialists and in different hospital systems.

Explore Our Clinical Rotation Sites