Evaluation of Emergency and Critical Care Medicine Residents’ Accuracy in Electrocardiogram Interpretation in Addis Ababa Ethiopia: A cross-Sectional Study
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Date
2021-10
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Addis Abeba University
Abstract
Background: Electrocardiogram is the diagrammatic representation of the heart’s electrical
activity. Which can detect life-threatening conditions within minutes. It’s one of the major
investigative modalities that emergency physicians should be accurate at. The accuracy of
emergency residents varies from country to country with improvement in interpretation as the year
of residency increases. there are no published papers in ECG interpretation among emergency
residents up until now but a study which was done on graduating medical students show low
competency.
Objective: To assess the accuracy of Emergency and Critical Care Medicine residents in ECG
interpretation in Tikur Anbessa Specialized Hospital and Saint Paul Millennium Medical College.
Methods: A cross-sectional study was conducted on emergency and critical care medicine
residents of Tikur Anbessa specialized hospital and Saint Paul millennium medical college. Data
were collected from April 2021 to September 2021 by using a structured questionnaire. Data were
entered, cleaned, edited, and analyzed by using SPSS version 26.0 statistical analysis software.
Descriptive statistics and bivariate and multivariate binary logistic regression were used to analyze
the data.
Results: Fifty-seven emergency and critical care medicine residents were able to participate in
this study out of which 33 (57.9%) were from Addis Ababa University and 24 (42.1%) were from
saint Paul millennium medical college. The average score of EMCC residents on the interpretation
of the ECGs was 29.5%. Only ten residents (17%) were able to correctly interpret >50% of the
ECGs. most of the residents who participated in this study were year 1 residents (49.1%) followed
by year 2 residents (31.2%). Out of 15 ECG abnormalities, the commonly identified ones were
polymorphic ventricular tachycardia (64.9%), normal sinus rhythm (49.1%), and double chamber
pacemaker (45.6%). Year of residency (AOR 3.34, 95% CI: 1.1,10.2) was found to be significantly
associated with higher performance in ECG interpretation.
Conclusion According to this study emergency medicine and critical care residents have low
accuracy in interpretation of ECG which is comparable to a study which was done in South
Africa and Australia.
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Keywords
Accuracy, electrocardiogram interpretation, emergency, and critical care residents.