A Systematized Review of Pediatric Resident Selection Criteria

Providing high-quality medical services and training future specialists is one of the most vital tasks of the medical education system but there is still no agreement on the best strategy for selecting the most competent candidates in the future. This study aimed to review studies on the currently used criteria. 

In this systematized review, the research question was “What are the criteria for selecting pediatric residents in medical universities?" PubMed, Scopus and ISI databases were searched electronically on March 23, 2022 with the defined strategies, based on which 624 articles were retrieved. After omitting duplicates along with title and abstract screening, 72 remaining full papers were studied and the results were extracted from 17 eligible articles.

Based on the review, 11 criteria and tools were identified; they includes: Structured Interview (SI), Letter of Recommendation (LoR), Multiple Mini-Interview (MMI), P-Mex, Assessment Letter for Pediatrics (ALPs), Situational Judgment Test (SJT), Scholar activities, Global assessment, Competency-based assessment center, University grades, and USMLE scores.

The findings suggested that it is necessary to determine a valid and reliable framework to assess the expected competencies and specific tasks including cognitive and non-cognitive qualities that predict successful future performance.