Introduction: Physician wellness has recently become a popular topic of conversation and publication within the house of medicine and specifically within emergency medicine (EM). Through a joint collaboration involving Academic Life in Emergency Medicine’s (ALiEM) Wellness Think Tank, Essentials of Emergency Medicine (EEM), and the Emergency Medicine Residents’ Association (EMRA), a one-day Resident Wellness Consensus Summit (RWCS) was organized.

Methods: The RWCS was held on May 15, 2017, as a pre-day event prior to the 2017 EEM conference in Las Vegas, Nevada. Seven months before the RWCS event, pre-work began in the ALiEM Wellness Think Tank, which was launched in October 2016. The Wellness Think Tank is a virtual community of practice involving EM residents from the U.S. and Canada, hosted on the Slack digital-messaging platform. A working group was formed for each of the four predetermined themes: wellness curriculum development; educator toolkit resources for specific wellness topics; programmatic innovations; and wellness-targeted technologies. 

Results: Pre-work for RWCS included 142 residents from 100 different training programs in the Wellness Think Tank. Participants in the actual RWCS event included 44 EM residents, five EM attendings who participated as facilitators, and three EM attendings who acted as participants. The four working groups ultimately reached a consensus on their specific objectives to improve resident wellness on both the individual and program level. 

Conclusion: The Resident Wellness Consensus Summit was a unique and novel consensus meeting, involving residents as the primary stakeholders. The summit demonstrated that it is possible to galvanize a large group of stakeholders in a relatively short time by creating robust trust, communication, and online learning networks to create resources that support resident wellness.

Introduction: Interest is growing in specialty-specific assessments of student candidates based on clinical clerkship performance to assist in the selection process for postgraduate training. The most established and extensively used is the emergency medicine (EM) Standardized Letter of Evaluation (SLOE), serving as a substitute for the letter of recommendation. Typically developed by a program’s leadership, the group SLOE strives to provide a unified institutional perspective on performance.  The group SLOE lacks guidelines to direct its development raising questions regarding the assessments, processes, and standardization programs employ. This study surveys EM programs to gather validity evidence regarding the inputs and processes involved in developing group SLOEs.

Methods: A structured telephone interview was administered to assess the input data and processes employed by United States EM programs when generating group SLOEs.

Results: With 156/178 (87.6%) of Accreditation Council of Graduate Medical Education-approved programs responding, 146 (93.6%) reported developing group SLOEs. Issues identified in development include the following: (1) 84.9% (124/146) of programs limit the consensus process by not employing rigorous methodology; (2) several stakeholder groups (nurses, patients) do not participate in candidate assessment placing final decisions at risk for construct under-representation; and (3) clinical shift assessments don’t reflect the task-specific expertise of each stakeholder group nor has the validity of each been assessed.

Conclusion: Success of the group SLOE in its role as a summative workplace-based assessment is dependent upon valid input data and appropriate processes. This study of current program practices provides specific recommendations that would strengthen the validity arguments for the group SLOE.