Toward a new paradigm: goal-based residency training.

Objectives: Many factors affect the clinical training experience of emergency medicine (EM) residents, and length of training currently serves as a proxy for clinical experience. Very few studies have been published that provide quantitative information about clinical experience. The goals of this study were to determine the numbers of clinical encounters for each resident in emergency department (ED) rotations during training in a 3-year program, to characterize these encounters by patient acuity and age, to determine the numbers of encounters for selected clinical disorders, and to assess the variation in clinical experience between residents.