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We surveyed the faculty, fellows, and residents of a department of medicine to determine the relative importance of each of eight personal characteristics evaluated during the interview of house staff candidates. A booklet containing all possible pairings of the eight characteristics was distributed to 219 participants who were asked which member of each pair should have greater weight for assigning an overall interview grade. Usable data were returned by 172 persons (79%) and analyzed by the psychometric scaling method of paired comparisons. The four characteristics with the greatest relative weights were professional attitude, maturity, enthusiasm and energy, and knowledge. The faculty, fellows, and residents were highly consistent in their judgments. However, three of the characteristics (motivation for clinical practice, knowledge, and verbal skill) significantly distinguished the three departmental groups. These results show that utility of the paired comparison method for identifying a department's weighting of variables for selection of house staff.

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The faculty, residents, and fellows of the Department of Medicine, University of North Carolina (UNC) School of Medicine, Chapel Hill, were surveyed about procedures that graduates of general internal medicine programs should be able to perform independently. More than 95% of the 177 respondents agreed that, of 71 procedures, all program graduates should be able to perform 13 without supervision. Our results are similar to those of studies at two other universities with geographically distant and philosophically different departments of medicine. The UNC faculty, fellows, and residents had significant differences of opinion on the need for training in 18 procedures. Residents tended to endorse training in the largest number of procedures, faculty the fewest, with fellows in between. The respondents' subspecialty affiliations did not influence their opinions on any of the procedural skills.