Should Do or Could Do? Exploring How Trainees Make Sense of When Supervisors Change Their Proposed Clinical Approach

PURPOSE: Faculty supervisor modification of trainee approaches to clinical encounters represents a chance for trainees to learn what is different about their conceptualization of the case that merits change. In addition to identifying errors or gaps in knowledge on the trainee's part, these changes can highlight meaningful variation in clinical approaches. However, little is known about if and how trainees arrive at this understanding. This study explores how trainees make sense of supervisor changes to their proposed clinical approaches. METHOD: Semistructured interviews with senior emergency medicine trainees from 3 academic institutions were performed between May 2024 and January 2025. Content was analyzed using a constructivist grounded theory approach with meaningful variation as a sensitizing framework to generate a model of how trainees understand supervisor changes to their clinical approaches. RESULTS: Sixteen trainees in their final year of emergency medicine residency participated. Trainees saw changes as learning opportunities. However, trainee descriptions often revolved around preemptively modifying their approach to match the anticipated supervisor approach, thus avoiding changes altogether because trainees experienced discussing changes with supervisors as antagonistic and burdensome. When trainees did experience a change, they distinguished changes as clinical or stylistic (practitioner or context based). Perceiving the former to signal what they should do and the latter what they could do, trainees demonstrated greater investment in understanding clinical vs stylistic changes. Trainees frequently described attributing the reason for the change to 1 of these 2 domains on their own without supervisor input and only occasionally asking their supervisor. CONCLUSIONS: Trainees perceived value in understanding changes to their approaches but frequently did not engage supervisors in their meaning-making and sometimes preemptively avoided changes altogether. Such missed opportunities for exposure to meaningful variation suggest opportunities for educators and training systems to increase the frequency and decrease the perceived hostility of these conversations.