Academic emergency medicine : official journal of the Society for Academic Emergency Medicine
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Regression techniques are versatile in their application to medical research because they can measure associations, predict outcomes, and control for confounding variable effects. As one such technique, logistic regression is an efficient and powerful way to analyze the effect of a group of independent variables on a binary outcome by quantifying each independent variable's unique contribution. Using components of linear regression reflected in the logit scale, logistic regression iteratively identifies the strongest linear combination of variables with the greatest probability of detecting the observed outcome. ⋯ The resulting logistic regression model's overall fit to the sample data is assessed using various goodness-of-fit measures, with better fit characterized by a smaller difference between observed and model-predicted values. Use of diagnostic statistics is also recommended to further assess the adequacy of the model. Finally, results for independent variables are typically reported as odds ratios (ORs) with 95% confidence intervals (CIs).
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The management of acutely ill and injured patients is an essential component of medical student education, yet the formal integration of emergency medicine (EM) into the medical school curriculum has progressed slowly since the inception of the specialty. Medical student interest and the number of resident positions in the National Resident Matching Program are higher than any time in the past, yet students often find access to EM faculty and clinical experience limited to a fourth-year rotation. ⋯ Academic emergency physicians (EPs) should advocate our specialty's importance in their medical school curricula using a proactive approach and actively involve themselves in medical student education at all stages of training. The goals of this article are to describe several approaches for EM faculty to expand medical student exposure to the specialty and enhance student experiences in the core principles of EM throughout the undergraduate medical curriculum.