A Modified Team Based Learning Approach to Enhance Resident Education in Outpatient Internal Medicine

This article was migrated. The article was not marked as recommended. Objective: To implement a modified team-based learning (TBL) approach in ambulatory care education- for a large Internal Medicine residency program with limited resources- and to evaluate its effectiveness. Methods: 91 medicine residents were exposed to a modified TBL curriculum, composed of high-yield topics for ambulatory medicine. All residents participated in 10 TBL sessions per academic year. One faculty and one chief resident developed the pre-session reading requirements, readiness assurance tests, and clinical case scenarios for each session and facilitated the TBL exercises. At the end of the academic year, residents were asked to complete an anonymous survey online. Results: 72.5% of residents completed the survey. 96% reported being actively engaged in the sessions and contributing substantially to the discussions. A majority expressed preference for future TBL sessions. Educational effectiveness of TBL was at least as good or better compared to traditional lectures. Both faculty and residents expressed very high satisfaction with our TBL format. Conclusion: We successfully implemented a one year modified TBL curriculum to teach high yield topics in outpatient internal medicine in a large, multi-site residency program. TBL resulted in high resident engagement in the classroom and high satisfaction with the format by both residents and faculty.