Abstract
Introduction
Wilderness medicine education is generally outside the required milestones of an emergency medicine residency, making it difficult to integrate a longitudinal wilderness curriculum during this period of training. Five years ago, we started a voluntary gamified wilderness medicine curriculum in an attempt to encourage resident wellness through engagement with the outdoors. With increasing popularity of the curriculum, we have developed a custom mobile app for easier curriculum management, quiz tracking, and event planning.
Objective
To create an engaging, inclusive, longitudinal resident curriculum for wilderness medicine topics and applications.
Methods
A point-based system was chosen for tracking engagement and progress. Residents earn points for sharing outdoor activities, taking monthly quizzes, and attending wilderness medicine events, where they have the opportunity to earn greater points by teaching or presenting topics. A senior resident director oversees content creation based on Auerbach’s textbooks. Incentives include a 1-mo rural elective in Alaska limited to the 3 highest-scoring senior residents and an overnight senior retreat open for all. A custom mobile app helps track scores automatically, allows comments, and provides notifications and tracking for events and quizzes.
Results
We have increased individual class engagement from 33% to 70% over 5 y, with an average composition of 34% male residents and 66% female residents. Engagement has improved as we offered a more frequent, wide variety of event types and locations as well as monthly asynchronous quizzes. A custom mobile app provides a cohesive experience with streamlined curriculum management but requires its own time-consuming maintenance and bug fixing. A similar curriculum could easily be instituted via multiple existing free platforms to introduce wilderness medicine at any program successfully.
Conclusions
Incorporating a gamified wilderness medicine curriculum into an emergency medicine residency can help successfully achieve widespread engagement, allowing increased exposure to wilderness medicine topics and applications.
Keywords: wilderness medicine, medical residency, cultural diversity, wellness program, educational technology, active learning
Winner of the Outstanding Research Presentation by a Researcher-in-Training award at the Wilderness Medical Society 2023 Summer Conference.