DOES RESTRUCTURING THE RESEARCH CURRICULUM OF ORTHOPEDIC TRAINING PROGRAM AFFECT THE RESEARCH PERFORMANCE? EVIDENCE FROM QATAR

Background: The participation of trainees and faculties in the research is an integral part of postgraduate medical training and education. The educational curriculum of the training program should be structured to support the learning of the trainees scholarly activities, address research barriers, foster a culture of inquiry, and improve their research performance. The Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education International (ACGME-I) standards include participation in scholarly activities by residents and faculties as an essential requirement of the training program.The possible effects of research-based curriculum after accreditation of postgraduate training program on the research performance was examined in a longitudinal study of the orthopedic training program. Methods: Web-based systematic review for all publicationsfrom our orthopedic training program and only pubmed index publications of other institutional programs before (2009-2013) and after (2014-2018) accreditation was conducted. Data for the type of publications, journal name, impact factors, dates published, orthopedic specialty, level of evidence,and the role of residents and faculties in the authorship were collected.The research academic degree of residents, number of residents applied and matched for a fellowship in North America and/or UK were collected from a residents portfolio. Results: The orthopedics training program published a total of 50 articles between 2009 and 2018, which represented 2% of all other institutional programs publications. There was a significant improvement in the number of publications from three (6%) to 47(94%) articles before and after accreditation, respectively. There were 19(38%) original researches, 17(34%) review articles, 13(26%) case reports, and one letter to the editor. International Orthopedics was the most commonly used journal with ten publications (25%). Most of the publications were in orthopedic trauma with 18 articles (36%), 10(20%) pediatric orthopedics, 7 (14%) foot and ankle and 7(14%) spine articles. The residents were the first author in 50% of publications, and at least one-third were published during their training. Conclusion: This study showed that the development of the structured research based educational curriculumof the residency training program after accreditation helped in enhancing the research performance and publications in our postgraduate training program. Restructuring of the research-based curriculum after accreditation of the program appears to increase the trainees and faculties chances of being an author or co-author of a scientific article.