What Motivates Students from the First National Promotion of Residents of the New French Diploma of Emergency Medicine?

Aims: Motivation is positively correlated with involvement, perseverance, learning strategies and performance; we wanted to identify the motivational profile of students in the first class of the Specialized Diploma in Emergency Medicine, in order to identify motivational levers and actions for teachers to improve the quality of training. Procedure: We have conducted a descriptive, multicenter, observational study of first year interns at DES. An online self-administered questionnaire was sent to all interns. The five components of motivation were explored: intrinsic motivation, extrinsic motivation, perceived value-to-task, perception of controllability, and sense of self-efficacy. Results: Three hundred and seventy-five residents of the 2017-2018 class responded, representing a participation rate of 81.5%. Intrinsic motivation was significantly higher than extrinsic motivation (5.7 versus 3.8). Among the other components of motivation, the perceived value-to-task was the highest (5.9) before the perception of controllability (5.2) then the sense of self-efficacy (5.2). There was no correlation between the different components of motivation and the rank of ECN (national classifying end of study examination programme) ranking, or whether or not emergency medicine was their first choice. Conclusion: The first promotion of emergency medicine interns was that the overall scores were high on motivation. Two levers were identified on which teachers can primarily try to act in order to improve the motivation of the interns.