National Resident Survey

2024 American Board of Family Medicine National Resident Survey

Rationale and Methodology:

The American Board of Family Medicine (ABFM) has a long history of collecting data from its Diplomates to evaluate its certification program, including residency training requirements. With growth in residency training programs and new flexibility in curricula design, ABFM decided to begin surveying residents in training in 2023.

The National Resident Survey (NRS) provides ABFM an opportunity to better understand, from the residents’ perspective, the current progress and challenges facing family medicine training programs, particularly during this period of implementation of new program requirements and competency-based board eligibility requirements. It also provides an opportunity for the specialty to better understand the current and future impacts of training environments on family medicine resident and physician well-being and practice.

The NRS was administered to all family medicine residents who completed the ABFM In-Training Exam (ITE) in October 2024. Of the 14,997 residents offered the NRS, 14,954 (99.7%) responded to at least one item in the survey and 14,846 (99.0%) completed the entire survey.

Each class of residents were given different questions.

Key Findings:

• Burnout continues to be a prevalent problem among residents that becomes more prevalent in higher levels of training with residents reporting positive 2 item burnout score at the following rates by class:

PGY1 = 43%
PGY2 = 49%
PGY3 = 51%

• 39% of PGY1 residents chose family medicine during their clerkship year.
  DO residents tended to choose earlier in their training (before medical school through the clerkship year) while MD residents were more likely to choose later (clerkship year, post-clerkship year, and during Match process).
• The majority of PGY1 residents report they “signaled” the residency program (59%) and geographic area (72%) where they ultimately matched.
• 50% of PGY1 residents stated that state restrictions on medical practice (abortion care and/or gender affirming care) impacted their application and ranking decisions with 34% reporting being less likely to apply or rank programs in states with restrictions
• PGY2 residents reported that state restrictions on abortion were having a negative impact on their residency training in not only abortion care, but also pregnancy care areas including miscarriage management, routine pregnancy care, and high-risk pregnancy care.
• Nearly a third of PGY2+ residents report spending more than 3 hours a night working on the EHR outside of normal office hours (pajama time).
• Only 73% of PGY2+ residents reported being directly observed caring for a patient in the last 2 weeks and only 88% reported having any assessment or feedback in the last 2 weeks.
• 28% of PGY3+ residents do not self-assess as reaching competence in the core outcome of caring for children independently in practice.

2024 National Resident Survey Summary of Results