Beyond the Differential: Evidence-Based Strategies for Morning Report Facilitation (2024)

Morning report is an educational conference that is central to internal medicine residency training. At many institutions, facilitating morning report represents the most substantial portion of chief resident teaching responsibilities. Despite the advantages of report, its often-mixed audience of learners and faculty as well as the flexibility incurred by a case-based format, can pose unique challenges to chief residents. Furthermore, chief residents have few opportunities to learn how to lead an effective report. While the structure of morning report differs across programs and institutions, the skills needed to engage and facilitate interactions between various levels of learners and participating faculty members are universal. The way a chief resident conveys information and engages the learners can often be more crucial to the success of report than the actual content itself. This workshop will help rising chief residents develop evidence-based skills grounded in adult learning theory to effectively facilitate morning report with a mixed audience. The presenters have a cumulative 35 years of experience as report facilitators, training chief residents to lead report, and conducting multi-institutional qualitative research on the characteristics of effective chief resident-led morning reports and will share strategies that lead to creation of a safe learning climate, titration of faculty involvement, and engagement of all learners through interactive small group discussions, video-based examples, and role modeling of facilitation skills. At the end of the workshop, participants will be given an electronic toolbox to bring effective morning report facilitation skills to their home institutions.