Off-service resident education in the emergency department: outline of a national standardized curriculum.

Although many residency programs mandate at least one rotation in emergency medicine (EM), to the best of our knowledge, a standardized curriculum for emergency department (ED) rotations for "off-service" residents has not been developed. As a result, the experiences of these residents in the ED tend to vary during their rotations. To design an off-service EM curriculum, we adopted Kern's six-step approach to curriculum development as a conceptual framework. The resulting program encompasses clinical experience and didactic sessions through which residents are trained in core topics and skills. This knowledge will be applicable in the clinical settings in which residents will continue to train and ultimately practice their specialty. It is flexible enough to be applicable and implementable without being limited by resource availability or faculty strengths.