Study objective: This study seeks to determine if resident physicians have different patient satisfaction scores compared to attending physicians when surveyed upon disposition from the emergency department.Methods: This was a prospective study performed at a level 1 trauma center emergency department with an annual volume of approximately 55,000. A trained, non-physician, research assistant identified patients who had a final disposition and would then assist in the completion of a survey comparing the resident and attending physicians. The questions addressed categories of courtesy, listening, concern for comfort, informed on care, and an overall assessment of the physicians. Each participant was asked the same survey questions for both the attending physician and the resident physician and a photograph of each physician was shown at the start of each survey. Each category surveyed was ranked on a 1-5 scale, with 5 being the highest. The research assistant would then enter responses into RedCap. Data was then calculated by Spearman's rank correlations to determine the association between attending and resident scores. The Spearman's rank correlations allowed researchers to determine the association between the attending physician and resident physician scores.Results: We found that resident physicians had a higher score in every category. The Spearman's rank correlations coefficients for the categories of courtesy, listening, concern for comfort, informed on care were, 0.33, 0.26, 0.27, 0.31; respectively, and with a p-value for each category of <0.0001. We also found that the overall assessment of the physicians yielded 0.31, with a p-value of <0.0001, providing the resident with an overall higher assessment.Conclusion: This study found that resident physicians scored higher in multiple satisfaction categories when compared to attending physicians. However, the exact causation is not clearly delineated in this study and could be related to the amount of time each physician spent with the patients, the number of visits to the patient room, or due to the resident physicians taking the primary management role of the patient care. There is an absolute need to further investigate other factors that influence patient satisfaction.
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