Are They Ready to Be Senior Residents?

The ‘July Effect’ in supervisory residents: assessing the emotions of rising internal medicine PGY2 residents and the impact of an orientation retreat

“…It demonstrates the effectiveness of an orientation in reducing fear toward the supervisory resident role, improving self-assessed comfort with the guiding principles of triaging and admitting, and raising confidence that internship had prepared these residents for their coming responsibilities. These data help to confirm prior anecdotal evidence [15] and, importantly, serve as a starting point for further educational quality improvement work. Quantification of curricular interventions allows for year-on-year content updates to be measured and can help guide multiple plan-do-study-act cycles.…”

“…In practice, however, many internal medicine residency program leaders believe in the July Effect's existence and have invested resources in combatting it [7]. While most of the interventions are didactic and target new post-graduate year (PGY) 1 residents, [7,8] approximately 60% of programs conduct orientation programs to support rising PGY2 residents transitioning into supervisory roles [7,[9][10][11][12][13][14][15].…”

“…In line with prior needs assessments, these orientations typically focus on leadership and teaching skills [9,11,13,14]. Anecdotal evidence hints at the efficacy of rising PGY2 retreats [15] and limited quantitative assessment suggests an improvement in participants' team-building capacity [9], but critically, these retreats have not to date been evaluated through the lens of resident wellness or emotional well-being.…”