Western Journal of Emergency Medicine: Integrating Emergency Care with Population Health

Learning Objectives: Create an easily digestible infographic including pearls from residency didactics which can be consistently reproduced with minimal time commitment to maximize learning through asynchronous spaced repetition; discover the basic functions of Canva and methods to implement this into your residency.

Introduction: The pandemic has introduced drastic fluctuations in clinical experiences for residents. Given these circumstances, maximizing didactic education is even more critical for trainees. Spaced repetition has been deemed a beneficial way to solidify information into long term memory for learners. Despite initiating best practices in virtual didactics, it can be difficult to engage learners adequately in virtual format to ensure active learning and promote knowledge retention. We sought to combat these challenges by designing and distributing weekly infographics summarizing key learning points from didactics.

Curricular Design: For any resident academic project, the rigorous schedule is an anticipated barrier to consistent production. The user-friendly graphic design platform, Canva, was used to create a template that could be easily reproduced and modified. Each week, several residents each committed to highlighting a single learning point from each lecture, editing the template, then disseminating the infographic 1 week later via multiple routes including email and social media to utilize spaced repetition.

Impact/Effectiveness: A survey of the CORD listserv found most respondents have interest in similar initiatives but have either failed to attempt or failed to operationalize it consistently. Barriers cited include lack of a platform, too arduous, and too time consuming. 6 months after implementing this system, we have been able to produce weekly content. Over half of our faculty and residents read these summaries, and feedback has been exceedingly positive. Faculty state they enjoy rapidly staying abreast of the topics covered in didactics if they didn’t attend, and even use them as rapid reference material. Residents appreciate the reinforcement of critical concepts through spaced repetition. This is engaging learners, faculty, and alumni, reinforcing learning points, and can be disseminated on social media.