Evaluation of emergency and critical care medicine residents’ accuracy in Electrocardiogram Interpretation in Addis Ababa Ethiopia: A cross-sectional study

Background: The 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 have been no published papers on ECG interpretation among emergency residents up until now, but a study that was done on graduating medical students shows low competency. Objective: To assess the accuracy of Emergency and Critical Care Medicine residents in ECG interpretation at 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 using a structured questionnaire. Data were entered, cleaned, edited, and analyzed 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 the interpretation of ECG, which is comparable to a study that was done in South Africa and Australia.