Scholarship initiative program (SIP): Increasing scholarly activity in an orthopedic residency over a 8-year period

Introduction For many decades, a common Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education (ACGME) citation for community based orthopaedic residency programs has been a lack of scholarly activity. Many obstacles have been cited in the literature for a low output in scholarship, from lack of mentoring and infrastructure, to perceived value of research. In this paper we sought to 1) describe interventions directed toward increasing scholarly activity through our scholarship initiative program (SIP), and 2) provide an objective comparison of the scholarship activity items (SAI) between our pre- and post-intervention periods. Methods The study period spanned 8 years, evenly split in two: the pre-intervention and post-intervention periods. The intervention date was July 1, 2018, marking the hiring of a new program director who implemented the SIP. The SIP included interventions such as faculty recruitment, culture shift, mentorship, resource awareness and utilization, quarterly research meetings, research requirements, resident recruitment, financial incentives, and public recognition. Results When comparing the pre- and post-intervention periods, there were significant increases: resident presentations (12–76, p-value 0.028), resident peer-reviewed publications (3–43, p-value 0.029), faculty presentations (4–84, p-value 0.028), unique peer-reviewed publications (5–35, p-value 0.027). There was a trend towards statistical significance in faculty peer-reviewed publications (5–37, p-value 0.055). There was a trend towards higher Impact Factor of the journals of published manuscripts (1.3–1.8), although not statistically significant. Conclusion Implementation of an SIP at a small community-based orthopaedic residency program significantly increased SAI between the pre- and post-implementation periods. We recommend this SIP as a guide to other residency programs seeking to increase both faculty and resident SAI.