Research and Scholarly Activity of Residency Programs of Family Medicine in Korea

Lee, Sung Hee; Paek, Yu Jin; Kim, Soo Young; Oh, Sang Woo; Shim, Jae Yong; Lee, Jung Kwon

Abstract

BACKGROUND: This study was conducted to survey current status of research and scholarly activity of residency programs and to evaluate quality of education.
METHODS
Questionnaire on research and scholarly activity were sent to all residency training programs by regular mail on May 2003. The questionnaire included detailed characteristics of residency programs, current status of conferences, educations for research activities, degree of faculty involvement, and numbers of published papers and presentations for past year.
RESULTS
A total of 103 residency programs answered the questionnaire. Most of the programs held journal review, book review, and clinical review in regular bases as scholarly activities. Smaller than 50% of the programs held case review, chart review, and psycho- social conference in regular bases. As research activity, 40 programs offered educations on epidemiology and statistics, and 55 programs held critical review of the literatures. Faculties involve actively in residents' research project in the process of designing research questions and selecting the subjects, but less actively in the process of gathering informations, completing manuscripts, and preparing presentations. Degrees of faculty involvement were smaller in the programs which are connected with medical school, had only 1 faculty, and educational experiences of the faculty were insufficient.
CONCLUSION
Current scholarly activities were active in various aspects, but psychosocial conference and chart audit should be encouraged. Special efforts are required in the research activities, especially in programs which were not connected with medical school and had only one faculty.